TimesTalks | Yuval Noah Harari

good evening everyone I'm Tom Kaluga executive creative director of the New York Times live conversation series times talks for over 20 years times talks has paired New York Times journalists with the brightest and boldest creative minds from the fields of film theater music art social justice politics and literature I'm delighted to welcome you to a thought-provoking evening of conversation with you've all noah Harare historian philosopher and international best-selling author of sapiens and Homo Deus her Ahri's new book 21 lessons for the 21st century signed copies of which are available tonight untangles political technological social and existential issues facing humankind today moderating tonight's event is Barry Weiss a writer and editor for The New York Times opinions section and winner of the reason Foundation's 2018 basquiat prize which annually honors writing that quote best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality wit and eloquence now please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our moderator Barry Weiss and our special guest you've all know a Harare well welcome fellow Apes or maybe I should say welcome future cyborgs and data cows you've all I think that one of the most amazing things that you've been able to accomplish in your books is sort of helping me see a room of people in a new way that we are animals despite you know the clothes on our backs and the iPhones in our pockets and in a hundred years from now we might be something radically different so that I just think that that's an amazing accomplishment I want to start with a sort of strange question maybe which is should I have kids and the reason I want to ask you that question is because the future that you lay out for us in your work including your most recent book twenty-one lessons is very bleak to my mind and not just because of ecological meltdown or potential nuclear war but especially because of this kind of biological caste system you lay out in which a few of us may be the lucky few of you are in this room will become kind of like gods and the rest of us will become useless kind of left behind and I know I'm gonna be one of them because I don't know how to work an Alexa so I am wondering if that's my future if my future life has no meaning no work and you know very small chance of happiness why should I bring children into that world um well the future first of all maybe you shouldn't I mean I don't have any children and my husband and me have no intention of bringing any is that why hmm is that why there are many reasons why but we can we can spend the entire evening just talking about that basically it never occurred to me I mean if people didn't tell me that there is such a thing in the world as having children I would never have thought about it myself this might be the difference between men and women or at least good part of it could be but in any case talking about this this issue of the future it should be very very clear that the future is not deterministic nobody has any idea how the future how the world would actually look like in in 50 years and it's still up to us yes technology is going to change the world in dramatic ways that's that certain AI and bioengineering will change the world will change us humanity in unprecedented ways but how exactly this is still up to us and you can use the same technology to create completely different kinds of societies the technology we are now developing really elevates us to the status of gods the gods of planet Earth and we can use that power to create paradise or to create hell but it's it's up to us so I'm interested in paradise and not hell what are a few things that we can do to create that and not to create this dystopian reality where most of us will be rendered useless what can we be doing now are there many things but the key is to have global cooperation because whatever you do in order to be effective it has to be done on the global level this is not something that any particular nation however powerful can do by itself if you're afraid of let's say Kass in a simple case like autonomous weapon systems killer robots yeah it's not such a difficult to understand that this is a very bad idea to develop autonomous weapon systems but how do you prevent it if the u.s. unilaterally says ok we are we are banning the development of autonomous weapon systems in the US this will not be binding on other nations like China or like Russia so what do you do 20 years from now if the Chinese are developing killer robots do you just say and do just say ok we are sticking with our band we don't we don't mind being left behind and even if you sign some global agreement on banning killer robots it's a dead letter it's very easy to just sign a piece of paper but how do you make sure that different nations actually live up to their commitments and you know when it comes to something like killer robot it's much it's far more difficult but with nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons if some nation has a nuclear weapons program like Iran or like North Korea they can't really do it in secret you know that something is happening but with developing new types of AI it's much easier to do it in secret so it's not enough to have an agreement you need to have real trust between nations and it's not impossible if for example today the Germans will come to the French and despite their history if the Germans tell the French trust us we don't develop killer robots I think the French will trust them and for a good reason if the Chinese say this to the Americans or vice-versa they won't trust each other we need to reach a level of trust like the one between the French and the Germans on a global level otherwise we have very little chance of regulating the disruptive new technologies of the 21st century well it seems to me that there could easily be trust between open societies or democracies or broadly liberal ones but it's impossible to have trust with a closed one or a dictatorial one correct um it's okay you'll definitely have that trust with the country like China as it currently stands well I don't know how but if we don't solve this problem then we are in a very bad situation because if we enter an AI arms race and this is what what's been happening over the last two or three years five years ago almost nobody cared about it but over the last two three years more and more governments around the world realize that this is happening this is big this is the key perhaps too dominating the 21st century and we are at the beginning of an AI arms race and if this continues then whoever wins the AI arms race humanity will lose and I don't know how to gain trust between the US and China I think what you are doing right now is not working but this is a key issue for for Homo sapiens for the human species it's far beyond geopolitics it's far beyond the interests of this nation or that nation this is the kind of technology that will reshape the future of life itself if this becomes subject to an up to an arms race and to the immediate political interests of this nation versus that nation it will be extremely difficult to prevent the worst-case scenarios I'd like to talk a little bit about nationalism which is something that in sapiens you said was on the wane but if you look around the world these days at air21 is important ISM trumpism regs it seems like nationalism is kicking ass and transnationalism or at least attempts at it like the European Union and the Euro and even the UN have sort of failed how do you explain that well first of all nationalism is still much much weaker than it was a century ago you just need to count bodies a century ago Europeans were killing each other by the million over national conflicts in the in the First World War today if you look say at Europe for all the talk about the rise of nationalism very few Europeans are willing to kill or be killed for nationalist ideals for me is a story and the most amazing thing about brexit was that only one person as far as as far as I know was killed a British MP who was murdered by some right-wing fanatic and you know a century or two ago a question like this should Britain be a part of a European bloc or should it be a completely independent country whatever that means could only really be decided by a major war with hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people dying and being wounded and losing their houses and so forth today you just go and vote about it and nobody almost nobody is willing to kill or be killed over it and you look at the Scottish referendum it's the same thing for centuries whenever the Scots wanted to be independent from London and they wanted a few times they had to raise an army and they had to fight pitch battles and have their cities being burned by armies and sent north from London now they just vote about it and whichever way the vote goes people accept it there are places in the world where you have received far more violence but still nothing like what we saw in past centuries and yes there is certainly a resurgence of nationalism and a weakening of transnational of universal values and universal cooperation and I think this is an unfortunate development not because nationalism in itself is is a bad idea it isn't it has contributed enormously to humanity for centuries it's just today the three big problems of humankind which are nuclear war climate change and technological disruption all of them can be solved only through global cooperation no government by itself can prevent nuclear war no government by itself can stop climate change and no government by itself can regulate AI and biotechnology so we just need global cooperation whether we'll actually do it I don't know but we definitely need it and there is room for hope I think because one very important thing to know about nationalism which many people miss is that it's not eternal it's it's not even natural to humans you hear a lot of talk about like nationalism it's in our genes it was imprinted by evolution in homo sapiens going against it is going against nature this is absolute nonsense but tribalism is natural tribalism is natural oh she's in a nationalism a way to sort of harness tribalism which can be extremely violent and dangerous as you write about in your book in your book a Taunus is it but it's a very very different phenomenon when you look at the long term history of human beings and their ancestors for millions of years we are definitely social animals and being part of a group part of a tribe and being very loyal to it yes this is in our genes this is in our nature but the chief characteristic of the group that gains human loyalty for millions of years was that it's an intimate community you know all the other people in your clan in your family in your tribe this is the chief current you know them the chief characteristic of Nations which appeared only in the last 5,000 years of also which is yesterday morning in evolutionary terms is that you don't know these people I live in a rather small nation Israel we have like 8 million citizens I don't know 99.9% of them I never met them I will never meet them in the US you have a few more millions and the same thing it's most of them are complete strangers and it's really kind of miracle of culture not of nature that you can through education and through propaganda and feel and through a lot of cultural manipulation that you can get millions of complete strangers to care about one another to feel that they are part of the same community this has been very difficult and this is not something which is natural to Homo sapiens it's not bad it's done a lot of good for for Humanity but it does mean that going beyond the nation is not impossible I mean to go from being loyal to a hundred people you know 200 million people you don't know that's very difficult to go from a hundred million people you don't know to eight billion people you don't know that's far easier I want to talk a little bit about what before we get to your current book just a question that I've been struck by and reading you a lot over the past few weeks is how do you have the balls to write the kind of books that you do because to me it's you know it's like a miracle that you managed to come out of the contemporary university system and not write a book that only four people read and write a popular history that you know with sapiens 10 million people I think read do your fellow academics hate you and how did you have the courage to do something so sweeping in all of these books really well at first I didn't take myself very seriously at least was the first book I didn't think that many people will read it it was originally written for college students and high school students in Israel so I I kind of took liberties that looking back was yes it was maybe a bit bit frightening but I didn't think it would reach millions of people around the world and my fellow scholars in I don't know what they say about me behind my back you know at least on my face most of them are very nice and very encouraged and very encouraging I think that many of them are happy that somebody is taking this job of bridging because because you know if everybody will do what I do we won't have science we won't have scholarship you need people to write these books that only four other experts read and I did it for for quite a few years at the beginning of my academic career but you also need to bridge the gap between the academic world and the public and I think it's more important than ever today to do so because the most important political problems of the 21st century are also scientific problems and if you don't bridge the gap between science and politics between the scientific arena and in the public arena that public debates you can't really understand what's happening in the world and this is true not only of biologists and computer scientists it's even more true of historians and philosophers and social critics and my view is that fellow sufferers have been preparing for this moment for thousands of years why are so many of them refusing to bite that's that's the mystery well that's the problem you know questions like free will like the meaning of humanity philosophers have been discussing this for thousands of years with almost zero impact on the rest of humanity because it was most of the time irrelevant it didn't really matter what you think about these issues but now these problems are suddenly becoming practical problems of engineering and of politics so this is the time for the philosophers and the historians and the people in the humanities to go out there and to talk about these issues it's it is suddenly very very urgent things that weren't very urgent in ancient Athens they are now extremely urgent and what you seem is that the engineers are taking over because philosophers maybe they are just too patient well we've been debating this without 5,000 years we can continue to the budget for 5000 years more but engineers are impatient when you design a self-driving car you can't wait five thousand years you need to decide ethical questions and philosophical questions now or in the next year or two should these Silicon Valley companies be hiring resident philosophers they are doing it or in in different ways either engineers that reinvent themselves as philosophers oh there are some philosophers who are also in at least type of subtilis AFER's who are being hired or play a part in this and I think again if you want to study something really prac tico in the 21st century philosophy is a good bet more than ever before more than many of the other things that that people are studying there are so many things that AI is going to do better than humans in the in the coming years maybe eventually also philosophy but this will be one of the last fields to fall to automation so before you've talked about the three challenges facing humanity biotech NEMA three for me again the three big problems nuclear war climate change and technological disruption especially the rise of AI and bioengineering if you could solve one of those problems which is the most urgent who they have a very different nature with nuclear war and climate change it's a kind of simple problem conceptually in the sense that everybody agrees what needs to be done we need to stop this some people may not agree that the problem exists okay but granted that if you think the problem exists then you think that what should be done is to stop it but with technological disruption it's a far more complicated problem because we don't want to give up on the immense potential of artificial intelligence and bioengineering and also there is no agreement about what is the best outcome and many of the projects that frighten some people get other people extremely excited so here at least intellectually the problem is far far more difficult I mean what to do with AI just stop it like with nuclear war this is not the answer mm-hmm I want to talk about the the sort of power of story which is something that is a major theme of your new book you make a strong case that we live in what you call the age of bewilderment you know we live in an age in which all of the old stories and the old myths religion nationalism even liberalism and the notion of human rights have sort of collapsed and there's no new story that's come along that's been compelling to replace them so we need a new story but you also sort of insist throughout the book that all stories are fictions they're not true there's not inherently true even the notion of individuality is a myth so how can we go about building a new story if those are the preconditions if it's all a construct mm-hmm how do we have the wherewithal to construct something and get people to believe in it well stories are tools humans think in stories we are restoring animal we don't think in facts we don't think in statistics we don't think in equations we think in stories so if you want to organize people together if you want to have an effective society you need to tell people a story that they can grasp easily and identify with the story doesn't need to be true it needs to be effective and throughout history you have this big debate that all scholars in all civilizations had to confront whether your aim is the truth or whether your aim is social cohesion and social harmony and almost all power all the at least the powerful and successful scholarly establishments reach the conclusion that social harmony is much more important than truth truth is like an acid mmm anything you put in it dissolves which on the individual level if you are on a quest to find the truth if you are on the quest to find the ultimate reality then yes you go that way but you can't build a stable social order on that basis and when you come to judge different stories then I would say the most important criterion is what is the impact on on suffering in the world a good story is a story that reduces suffering in the world and this is why for example liberalism and its belief in things like free will and like individualism and like human rights even though these things as far as our scientific understanding goes there are just myth like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny so there is a real awesome human right is just a story we tell ourselves they are not a biological reality they are not written in our DNA it's not part of nature that Homo sapiens has a right to this or has a right to that it's just a story we invented and tell ourselves and there is nothing wrong with it the the real problems begin when people forget when people lose the ability to tell the difference between the stories that we invent as tools and the reality so but here's a story you know we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness yes seems to me that's a really good story one that hitting the rocks or people out of poverty and I mean so but you're but you throw a lot of cold water on the notion that sort of that let's just call it liberalism can still hold up can still be a compelling story a story needs to be to adapt and be compatible with present-day realities and the reality has changed the technological reality is the economic reality is change and the stories it was relevant a thousand years ago may not be relevant today a story that was relevant 200 years ago may not be relevant today and in many cases it is because of technological changes but how do technological changes render the story that I just told you ok so let's take the the the central ideal of liberty and freedom and the idea that each individual is endowed with fully will and I make my own decisions freely and this is the highest authority in the world in a world where nobody has a technology to HAC human beings to decipher human beings and to predict their choices and manipulate their desires this story was excellent and it brought a lot of benefits to humankind but once you have the technology to hack humans to decipher and manipulate their desires a blind faith in free will becomes more and more dangerous because the easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe that other decisions reflect some mysterious for the will so why should we care about I don't know the Cambridge analytical scandal so what so what if Russian hackers show people fake news stories it doesn't matter all human choices reflect their free will we are we have this shield that protects us against all these kinds of manipulations so we don't care about it nobody can really understand me nobody can really manipulate me maybe they can manipulate other people but not me and these are the easiest people to manipulate to develop a healthy skepticism about this idea that my desires reflect my free will this I think it was always good to be a bit skeptical about your desires but it's extremely important to be skeptical today because we are gaining the technology actually the two necessary technologies to hack human beings in order to hack a human being you need to have a very good understanding of human biology and especially of the brain and you need a lot of computing power to amass and analyze all the relevant data we never had it before so it wasn't a big problem but now all very soon we will have it so are you concerned about the sociological implications of telling people that they don't have free will and how it will make them act in the world it will it will demand a lot of changes in many fields like the most obvious is the legal field the idea that we punish Apple for making bad choices that's that should be out ok ok we still need a legal system so bill cosby couldn't control his choices but we don't punish him for bad choices we can we and we should send him to jail for several other things first of all if you have the kind of brain that makes these decisions then you should then Society should be protected against you it's not a punishment for free choices but you need to protect people and secondly deterrence the brain when it makes its calculations takes into account what society does if you do this or if you do that so deterrence still works and thirdly and most importantly therapy if you have the kind of brain that makes these kinds of decisions that harm other people and that harm you we should try and help you we should try and kill you this sounds like a very slippery slope to eugenics to me the idea that we should protect society from people with bad brains or brains that aren't working right rather than judging them on their actions see know that it couldn't very easily we don't send somebody to jail just because he has this type of brain and we think that in the future he will make or she will make these kinds of decisions no it could easily lead to that in a culture in which we have tons of data everyone in know every yes that's one of the dangers but this danger will not go away just because we say oh we believe in a free will so we don't care about it the more data we amass about individuals and the better we understand what's really happening inside the brain the temptation to go in those dangerous directions is going to get bigger and bigger and we will have to deal with it who in the world is telling the most compelling stories right now oh good question who is telling the most compelling stories compelling in the sense of making people convincing keep convincing people a compelling story and the good story is totally different things okay what what we see now is a resurgence of a lot of nostalgic fantasies coming from make America great again of nationalism and of religion as the stories that were dominant in the 20th century are our collapsing or are in danger of collapsing then nostalgia becomes very very tempting and in this sense it's very compelling especially in an age of accelerating change when you come to people and say no there is an eternal truth that never changed and will never change it doesn't matter what happens with AI it doesn't matter what happens with biotechnology it doesn't matter what happens with climate change these truth will be there forever this is who you really are we don't need to care about this is now very very tempting the problem is that it doesn't offer any serious vision for the future of humankind and for how to deal with these problems I know you don't have children and you're not planning on having them but if you had one what story would you raise her on or which set of stories which set of stories but I would most importantly try to teach what is the difference between fiction and reality and the best test and the easiest there are many tests to know the difference between what is a fictional entity what is a fictional story in what is the reality but the most important test I think is the test of suffering if you want to know whether an entity is real or whether it's just the hero of a fictional story you should ask can it suffer a nation cannot suffer even if a nation loses a war it doesn't suffer it doesn't have a mind it has no consciousness it has no feelings similarly a cooperation cannot suffer currency like the dollar or the euro even if it loses half its value it doesn't suffer all these things our stories we created important stories powerful stories but they are just stories human beings are real animals are real they really suffer so I don't know which stories will dominate the world of say 2050 but I I do hope that people will retain this ability because it's so difficult to mean to take a much simpler example if you think about football or at least what is in most of the world is known as people how do you call it here soccer so I'm still under the impression of the world to play football you need to convince at least 22 people to believe in a common story which is obviously a human invention the rules of football are we invented them they didn't come from physics they didn't come from biology they didn't come from some God we invented them to play and enjoy football you need to convince at least 22 people to believe in this story for 90 minutes but what but the danger is that if somebody gets caught up in the story too much like a football hooligan and starts beating and even killing other people because of what happened in the game then that person has forgotten the difference between fiction and reality and it's easy to see it happening at least if you don't you're not a football hooligan yourself it's easy to see it the difference in football it's much much more difficult to see this difference when it reaches the level of believing in the nation or the cooperation of the dollar the book in the book you promised 21 lessons for the 21st century but it seems to me that if I had to reduce it to one it would be sort of what you just touched on before which is that there is human suffering in the world and that's the only real thing and the best thing that we can do at least to begin with is to observe it and meditate on it is that right no I mean I was afraid when I when I roll I feel like it's a stealth argument for like Buddhist meditation and well I do I certainly practice and recommend to people the type of meditation that I practice but when I wrote the book one of the things I feared is that because also in the last chapter of the book is about meditation I was afraid that people will come away with the impression that what I'm saying is well the Silver Bullet that will solve all of humanity's problem is just meditate and this is definitely not it won't it won't be the solution I don't think especially because I meditate myself I I meditate for two hours every day I go every year for a 60 days because yeah I know how difficult it is I am under no illusions that eight billion people are going to start meditating anytime soon and even if they do start meditating for many of them they will take it in all kinds of very problematic directions when when you just sit there with your mind and you cannot distract yourself with your smartphone with your television with your computer you just sit there and just have to observe your mind as it is this is so difficult and what you see is often so shocking and so painful that the temptation to take it in all kinds of very dangerous directions is very serious and we have a lot of examples from history from for how you know the best ideas about love and compassion more people were killed and persecuted in the name of the religion of love Christianity then in the name of any other idea in human history it's the most that the region of love turned out to be the most intolerant religion in human history and Buddhism has its own share of skeletons in the closet and in the basement in all kinds of places it's just humans are so difficult things that look wonderful on a small scale when you're just is some cave in the Himalayas so in a small ashram with a couple of other monks so in a monastery in the Syrian desert when you try to scale it up to millions and billions of people all kinds of strange things like the Inquisition and the Crusades tend to crop up see and I would say that this is an argument against the kind of global cooperation that you're mad meaning that's what makes me past skeptical of it and pessimistic because as you've sort of argued convincingly to me through the course of these three books humans are barely able to look beyond the Nate I mean the nation was even a stretch mm-hmm a very big stretch so how are we gonna get to the global thing oh it's going to be difficult and maybe we'll fail but we have to try because I don't I just don't see how you can the fact that this is the maybe only way to solve our major problems doesn't guarantee will actually succeed maybe it's the only way and we won't be able to do it but I just don't see how you can solve something like climate change or like are the dangers of bioengineering unless you have substantial global agreement substantial global cooperation on these issues now I'm not completely pessimistic it can be done the best example we have so far is how humankind has managed to deal with nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 60s you had all these doomsday prophecies that the Cold War is going to end in a nuclear war which will destroy human civilization and it didn't happen I can say about myself personally that I think that the event that shaped not only my life but also my perception of history more than anything else was the end of the Cold War and hell well first of all if it ended in a different way I wouldn't be here you wouldn't be here and nobody would be here so it was a great achievement for humankind and it was achieved through really not the arrest global cooperation but it wasn't the achievement of one nation it was definitely not the achievement of the United States by itself many of the most difficult decisions that led to the to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War were done in Moscow and the fact that the Soviet Union you know not just the Soviet Union but the the Communist leadership in Moscow and Gorbachev in person they gave up more power than anybody else in the history of humankind if you think who gave up the most power in the history of humanity the prize will go to Gorbachev and this is a big thing what does that tell you that what do you would you what are you getting at when you're saying that no I'm just saying that you you earlier when he spoke about this how can you get cooperation between different political systems so when I look at the end isn't the answer that they knew they were losing lots of people when they know they are losing they don't give up and you know at the time that the Soviet leadership at least part of it gave up they were still in control of the most powerful conventional army that ever existed and this army was loyal if Gorbachev gave the order to fire they would have fired they had enough nuclear power nuclear weapons to destroy the whole of the world several times over if you had somebody else instead of Gorbachev in Moscow if you had Milosevic if you had show chesco if you had people like that in Moscow instead of Gorbachev you would have got a very different result many times in history even if didn't you see that you're losing when Hitler saw that he was losing he didn't say okay so didn't work not as far as I know I want to read you a line that stuck out for me from the book and then ask you about it you write that revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it into the center because the center is built on existing knowledge the guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach the centers of power and they tend to filter out the carriers of disturbing unconventional ideas I want to ask what this says about you how did you manage to smuggle yourself into the center to be celebrated by people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama and named every fancy person and at the Davos and Aspen crowds does it say something about the nature of your ideas that they're not as unconventional and disturbing as they seem or are you just very very good at promoting yourself well first of all I don't know much about promotion all the credit for the success of this really goes to to my husband and to my team support I just know how to write books but everything else really the genius behind it is my husband and whether the success means that actually my ideas are not really disturbing for me for the old order yes this is a possibility that I think about and you know when your books fail it's very easy to tell yourself or they fail because they are so revolutionary but people so it's actually a badge of honor I feel it's means that I'm telling the truth and nobody is willing to listen what it says about you know I'm a your pickup I think they're good yeah they're very good it's just it's interesting to me that they're being embraced by people that in a way they're arguing against and that this sort of in my view the I don't know if you'd identify with this word but the sort of nihilism of some of it is not being recognized for what it is yeah you can read any book on many different levels and I guess that's also true of what I write and many times I have this experience that I receive reactions which I realized they read the book in a completely different way that I intended but it's a very very old experience of all those and writers that once the book is out there you have no control over it or control about how people will read it and what people will do with it the ability of humans to interpret and reinterpret texts and stories is absolutely astounding so I don't know in time we'll term and what I try to do in my books is above all to change the conversation mm-hmm I see my books and especially the last book I'm in 21 lessons it's not a it's not really a book of lessons in the sense of these are the answers to the world's problems then it's really a book of questions it's telling people look these are the most important questions we should be dealing with yes immigration is important terrorism is important trade relations with China are important but there are far more important things going on that we are not paying enough attention to I for instance followed the last u.s. elections in 2016 and I was amazed that nobody was talking about AI and about biotechnology you heard Donald Trump saying things like the Mexicans will take real jobs but he didn't say the robots will take away jobs why not I mean even if it's not true who cares about the truth it's it's a very it's a very powerful story to tell the robots will take your jobs and he never suggested okay forget about the wall on the border with Mexico it won't help we need to build a wall on the border with California this is where the never suggested so and you know the only thing they talked about with regard to the AI and the information revolution and all that was Hillary Clinton's email right now emails this is like what 1990 so it's like a delay of 20 years in 2038 they did 20 to 36 they'll be talking about AI live but we need to talk about a and similarly I was I was watching the brac see debate in Britain and Britain is still one of the most important powers in the world it still has a seat on the Security Council I mean I would say to the British you don't want you don't care about the world ok give back your secure your place on the Security Council give it to somebody who really cares about the world give it maybe to Germany give it to Brazil give it to India you want to be out of it ok but give it up right I mean and when I watched at the brexit debate I was amazed not only by the lack of interest in the impact on the rest of the world but also in the fact that it was also like you know 19th century stuff mm-hmm and if you look at the three big problems again nuclear war climate change technological disruption how does brexit help us prevent nuclear war how does brexit help us deal with climate change it doesn't how does brexit help us regulate artificial intelligence and bioengineering it doesn't it just makes things more difficult because you need global cooperation to regulate these things if you have a strong EU that's much more easy than if you have 28 or something independent countries so I don't think there is inherently something wrong with nationalism always wanting to be an independent nation but in the 21st century we should realize no nation can be independent no nation can be ecologically independent you cannot build a wall against rising oceans or against rising temperatures and no nation can be independent when it comes again to AI and bio engineering so knowing that these are the three big ones a young person comes to you is about to enter university what you tell them to study and how do you tell them to spend their time I would first of all say that nobody has any idea how the job market would look like in 2050 anybody who tells you that they know how the job market will be and what kind of skills will be needed there are probably either deluded or mistaken or whatever so just start with the understanding that it is unknown and that most probably you will have to reinvent yourself repeatedly throughout your career not just the idea of a job for life but the idea of a profession for life this is our outdated if you will want to stay in the game you will have to reinvent yourself repeatedly and you don't know what kind of skills you'll actually need so the best investment is to invest in emotional intelligence and mental resilience or mental balance because the may be the most difficult problems will actually be psychological anxiety and stress yes I mean it's so difficult to reinvent yourself to learn new skills I mean it's difficult when you're 20 it's much much more difficult when you're 40 and to think that you have to do it again every day minion 15 a gamma neo 60 because you have longer lines lifespans and longer careers so emotional intelligence and mental stability mental balance I think will be the most important assets the problem is it's the most difficult things to teach or to study you can't read a book about emotional intelligence and okay now I know and most teachers they themselves are the product of the old system which emphasized particular skills and not this ability to constantly learn and reinvent yourself and keep your mental balance so we don't have a lot of teachers who are able to to teach these things but do you think that the humanities and the classics have a role to play in that they are concerned with the big questions about the meaning of life and how to live a good life or are those now irrelevant no as I said in the beginning I think they are more relevant than ever before in in in in many practical ways because a lot of questions are going to kind of migrate from the Department of Philosophy to the Department of engineering in the Department of Economics and questions like what do you really want to do with your life you are going to become far more practical than ever before given the immense powers that technology is giving us and and the ability to change yourself to change your body to change your brain is going to put enormous philosophical challenges in front of the average person you need to make the kind of decisions that for most of history were the stuff of thought experiments by philosophers what would you do if you could be this or you could be that I mean for almost everything you couldn't it was impossible so why should I care about it but in 20 years or 50 years maybe you can so in this sense I think that philosophy in the humanities in general are maybe more important than ever before before I ask you about one last question I want to point out we're gonna go to Q&A in a second there are two microphones I think that should be set up you can line up in front of those microphones and I'll call on you and please actually make them a short concise question before we go to the audience maybe a cheesy question but one I've been thinking about those who are your heroes oh who are my heroes mm you know like historical heroes a person here up here well Gorbachev is that I mentioned before I would say at least from the historical leaders of the last century or two I most admire him because I think I owe him my life and most of humanity in a way Oh owes him their lives and I really admire his ability to give a power which is so difficult for humans to do for thousands of years we just accumulated to give it up so difficult so I admire him do you admire Regan um never thought about it he's one of the reasons that Gorbachev gave it up I don't know I mean again you know it's it's a different stitch I mean yes maybe without Reagan Gorbachev would not need to give up so much power but still Gorbachev's job was far far more difficult than Reagan's job there are many leaders who can who can fight successful wars but to be able to give up so much power when you you really don't have to nobody can actually compel you it's not again it's not Hitler in Berlin in 1945 the Russians are closing and ok you don't want to give it power the Russians are coming to your bunker what do you do nobody could store Moscow in 1989 you couldn't you couldn't send armed divisions to conquer Moscow it had to come from the Soviets so in in this sense I would still admire Gorbachev more than Reagan you want to pick one more or do you want to just stick with Gorbachev them will go here I think what we I'll think about it more in the if I have yes please religion well it's far far less important than it used to be because it gave up most of oilcloth not gave up it lost most of its practical powers a thousand years ago when people needed rain when people faced an economic crisis when people faced the war and people faced an epidemic they would go to the priests they would pray to the gods and gradually religion lost almost all of these roles today even the religious people when there is an epidemic they first of all go to the doctors when there is no rain they first of all go to the to the engineers if it doesn't work also ok so let's go to the priests but that the first your first call is to the doctor and religion retains its its its importance mainly in shaping people's identity which is still a very important role but much more narrow than it was a thousand years ago I would say that today almost all the world in many important fields is belongs to a single civilization when it comes to building a hospital or building a bomb there is new almost universal agreement about how to do it irrespective of religion if you go to a hospital in tel-aviv or in Tehran or in Tokyo or in New York it's more or less the same thing and if you go to a nuclear reactor the same they have a total agreement about nuclear physics the Israelis and the Iranians so disagree but they all agree that e equals MC square and if we enrich our uranium you can do all kinds of interesting stuff with it there is no disagreement there so I think religion has lost most of its traditional roles again if you think about Jesus most of the time he was healing the sick today this is the job of doctors not of priests but when it comes to identity it's still very important and unfortunately it's mainly divisive we need a more global cooperation religion could have been a source of global cooperation because at least some religions espouse universal values but in practice when you look at the world today you see that in most cases when we're religions are powerful they have become the hand made of nationalism whether it's Sunni Islam in Turkey or Shiite Islam in Iraq of Judaism in Israel or Catholicism in Hungary in Poland or Orthodox Christianity in Russia in most places where religion has an important role to play it's simply the hand made of nationalism supporting the state so this is quite unfortunate but this is the case hello huge fan thank you I do share your belief or desire to distinguish reality between fiction so much so that I've often asked myself the question why is that the better orientation because I think there's pros and cons to each and the story's world there's like comforts that you don't get if you're looking at things ruthlessly so one is like why do you think that's the better orientation and two what kind of things give you comfort if you don't kind of look at those stories anymore give you comfort yes so if you're looking at things is this better yes okay so you mentioned about distinguishing fiction from reality and I share that belief with you but also there's pros and cons to living in each way if you believe in the stories you also get comforts that you don't get from looking at things in a very cold and realistic way so why question number one is why do you think that distinction is actually like worth it and question to you what kind of things give you comfort if you don't have the warmth of the traditional stories that are outdated stories can be extremely comforting and this is why it's so difficult to give them to give them and that's the case and this is why most people don't give them up but hold on to them for me personally and and this is just me I'm not saying that it works for for every everybody I take great comfort from from reality from just the ability to see reality clearly I I find it extremely comforting especially because one of the things you see you realize is that so much of the problems that you need stories in order to find comfort in the problems to actually are the result of other fictional stories in which you believe so if you can really go beyond these stories many of the problems just solve themselves but at least this is how it works for me I don't think it works the same for every person yes I very much enjoyed reading sapiens and Homo Deus and in the excerpt I read of the new book and what you talked about tonight is the importance of needing to reinvent yourself on multiple occasions in the future and that much of what will be learned in school in college now will largely be irrelevant given the rise of nano degrees and coding boot camps and and school opportunities that are short and targeted to specific jobs people still seem to require a four-year college degree in this country and when politicians talk about the education system they talk about making that free or not free but I'm wondering if you see any signs that the the four-year college degree is changing or are we sort of stuck with that and anything is going to be layered on top of X it seems like a lot of money and a lot of time to invest in something that will not really last you as long as it used to last thank you you know I think that the entire educational system is facing a huge crisis and it's really that the first system that faces this growing crisis because it needs to confront the future when you think about what to teach today in school or college you have to think in terms of 2040 and we don't have the answers so if you talk to experts in the educational field and almost all of them will tell you that the system is becoming more and more irrelevant but what can replace it we just don't know and you know there are many experiments being done and they work some of them quite well on a small scale but it's very difficult to scale it up from the level of the experimental small school to the level of an entire system with millions of teachers and tens of millions of students and I definitely don't have the answer I don't think that anybody at present have the answer it's also one of the problem is that we already have a system we don't start from scratch and the inertia of the system is immense you have all these buildings you have all these teachers you have all these bureaucrats I mean it's it's it's an immense system and I think this is the like the tip of the iceberg that here we are encountering for the first time this shock of of the future world and it's too early to expect to have the answers we we hardly began the debate but and my impression is that the educational system to be to be relevant will will have to switch from focusing on information and skills more in the direction of things like emotional intelligence of mental balance of learning how to learn and not learning a particular skill two quick questions before we go to you guys one easy one hard they're both from Facebook Madeline asks where do you get your news from and Emma asks does the singularity scare or excite you no where do I get my news from yeah I tend to read long books III distrust and you don't have a smartphone I don't have a smartphone I tend to distrust short texts does that mean you're not a New York Times subscriber I I hardly hardly read newspapers at all I I just I read books written by some new New York Times journalists but I don't tend not to follow the the immediate news cycle I think more in centuries than ours so this is a kind of answer again it works what's the most recent book you read that you loved that you recommend what's my most recent book I've read that I loved I just read a very interesting book about the opium war between Britain and China in the early 19th century I think it doesn't call it's not considered a news anymore I mean opioids yeah actually this is very one of the of the new books that I've just downloaded I listen to books on on audio is about the opioid epidemic now in the USA and the the similarities between China in the early 19th century in the USA today suddenly becomes quite quite striking singularity singularity I I try to remain calm with it I mean to take it into account yes it is likely that we are reaching an inflection point beyond which our imagination fails we cannot say anything to anything meaningful about how the world would look like a hundred years from now this is how I understand the singularity not in terms of some Big Bang or laws of physics or something like that but the point beyond which you just can't look so when you looked at the past many physicists called the Big Bang a single garetty the question what happened before the Big Bang is meaningless we don't have the abilities the tools to look before and we are approaching very fast a new point of singularity not fourteen billion years in the future but maybe fifty or a hundred years in the future which you simply cannot look behind beyond our imagination fails because one of the things that are going to change is our imagination once you have the technology to re-engineer the human imagination by definition you cannot imagine what will happen after that yes we mentioned in your in this book how important it was for you personally to understand story versus reality it defined who you are as a scientist as a story and a researcher which I would I would say majority of the world does not think like that and I will include other scientists historians and researchers what inspired you to one learn that distinction for yourself from my knowledge only person I know who's that adamant was Werner Erhard or was it someone else that inspired you to take on that structure for yourself try and keep it short so we can get to it it's just that I I got fed up of being repeatedly told these fictional stories when I was asking you know these big questions about the meaning of life and what are we doing here and what's what's what's the point of all that and you get again and again all these fictional stories and I just really got fed up with it yeah yes this is just this is a question about stories one of the stories that is being told now seems to be coming from the opposite end of a I stories and that's the neuroscience of the emotions the neuroscience of the emotions of course stress is the body and feeling and I'd find I would like to ask you about the contradiction one of your solutions so that people should become more aware than but I think if they do not think of themselves as bodies if they think of themselves as mental apparatus which could be which could be manipulated technologically then you have a tremendous contradiction there I but we just asked you to address this great well I think we are very far from understanding consciousness in the mind and our mental experiences but we are making tremendous and in ways frightening advances in understanding what is happening on the level of the body and of the brain and there very often in history in the history of science this this huge gap between our ability to manipulate and our ability to understand the consequences of the manipulations and we are becoming frightening ly good in deciphering and manipulating human emotions while we are not good at all in really understanding the human mind and what the consequences will do we are basically now conducting experiments on billions of human guinea pigs without any idea what the consequences will be in the past we did it on the planet we gained the ability to manipulate the ecological system to cut down forests and drain swamps and so forth without understanding the complexity of the ecological system and the result is that the ecological system is now collapsing the same thing might happen this is one of my fears on the internal level of the internal ecological system we are very far from understanding the complexities of the human mind but we are becoming very good in manipulating emotions and thoughts and so forth and this gap may result in an internal ecological collapse of our mental system thank you I am so sorry this has to be our last question and I'm seeing people that I know and we want to allow them to ask questions but hopefully you can find him after go ahead I'll keep it very short so you talked a lot about internal threats to humanity the three that you mentioned tonight and in the books and just a fun question a very curious you know but your personal belief had there been extraterrestrial life that threats humanity will that unite us I couldn't hear so I'm saying that if your personal thoughts I know that your historian but we talked about the future too had there been if we found that there is extraterrestrial life extraterrestrial okay yes it will get and and they come not necessarily with an olive branch but you know and I will that is a possibility that can unite well it is a possibility it's a receipt I don't know of any scientific evidence for the existence of life outside planet Earth but statistically it sounds quite probable that somewhere there is something whether it will be helpful in uniting us I think we have enough on our plates on planet Earth even without aliens coming and adding more I think that again nuclear war and climate change and the threat of technological disruption should be enough to unite our species if not we may not live long enough to encounter the aliens and on that hopeful note please I want to remind you that you can buy signed copies of 21 lessons for the 21st century straight out those doors thank you all so much thank you

Channel: undefined

Views: 240,914

Rating: 4.8037553 out of 5

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, author, historian, TimesTalks, Bari Weiss

Id: Vxvb7Nw9JCE

Length: 71min 26sec (4286 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ssorbom]

To me, the interesting part of this talk is immediately afterwards when he starts talking about the need for Global cooperation.

[u/Commentariat1]

I'm posting this talk from September 2018 here because I was never completely sure if this fact was true, or if Islam edged xianity out, or what.

It's good to have it from a trusted scholarly historian.

Of course, the entire talk is good (1h12m)

[u/[deleted]]

Honestly all religion has their hands soaked in blood to me, its not just Christianity. More and more people are slowly turning away and upholding our rationality over irrational hysteria.

[u/[deleted]]

Actually - greed tops them all, but yeah - belief in some magical sky fairy has seriously caused a lot of bloodshed.

[u/NewAcanthisitta0]

Oooh yes! If Yuval Noah says it, it must be true!

[u/ThorLives]

I'm doubtful about this claim.

While it's worth pointing out the 700 year head-start Christianity had on Islam, and the fact that there are more Christians than Muslims (by about 20%) - which also gives it a 20% "advantage" on body-count, it's also the case that more wealthy societies have more opportunity for harm. If you're dirt-poor, you're unlikely to be able to carry-out colonization, invasion, or a major slave-trade (although Islam did have an active slave-trade, too).

Sure, there were the Crusades, but that couldn't have happened without wealth. Islam had their own invasions of Europe - reaching into Southern France in the 700s (through Spain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_invasion_of_Gaul ) and reaching Austria in the 1500s (through the Balkan peninsula - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vienna ). If Islam had been wealthier, it would've cause more damage than it did historically.

I think people tend to ignore inconvenient parts of their religion and be shaped by the forces of wealth and conquest more often than we'd normally admit. In other words: humans will be humans regardless of the religion. In that context, the "religion" that will cause the most death will be the one with: the longest history, the most followers, and the greatest wealth and power - which enables them to carry out invasions and colonizations.

[u/Ramin_HAL9001]

I am starting to think this is a rather simple-minded claim to make and I find I agree with it less and less as time goes by.

On the one hand, yes, it is absolutely true that religion is used as a bludgeon. The religious people would argue that their own religion has the capacity for good and that you shouldn't blame their religion for the people who willfully misinterpret it to rationalize mass murder. Anti-religious people would say religion has caused more harm than good (and by the way, I am not convinced that there is much actual evidence that religion causes more harm than good).

But really, nowadays, I think this is completely the wrong argument to be having. The question to ask is, "when is religion used as a bludgeon, and when is it benign?" The real argument is this: can we better predict when religion is going to lead to harm and when it is not going to lead to harm? I mean, really think about it, don't just give the intellectually lazy answer of, "well, religion always leads to harm in the end, it never leads to good."

I think a better predictor of when religion leads to harm is when the conditions in society are such that there are a few very rich and powerful people and a mass of very poor and powerless people. The poor turn to religion to ease their suffering. The rich exploit the religious convictions of the poor in order to exploit them as raw human resources, start wars, acquire resources, and mass-murder their enemies.

From this, I think we can conclude that the wealth gap between rich and poor is much more dangerous than religion, because these are the conditions that lead religion to being used as a bludgeon when it would otherwise be benign.

[u/djdeserteagle]

I think that individuals who are dumb enough to murder for a religion should be held accountable, however, religion and it's type isn't the only factor in these systematic killings such as crusades, occupations etc... a lot of time it's powerful people or groups using the religion as reigns to control mass populations to fight for them to gain power. So it's kinda a grey area, yeah if we didn't have religion there wouldn't be as many mass killings of people, but we would probably be a couple thousand years behind as a species and would probably be killing each other some other way. It's kinda hard topic because sometimes the religions play a really beneficial role in civilization and sometimes they enable the gullible to be taken advantage of for bad and good things.

[u/humor_fetish]

Did any of you read his books, Sapiens, and the sequel, Homo Dues? They are absolutely phenomenal and would recommend to everyone.