- Good evening everyone, I'm Tom Kalaga, Executive Creative Director of the New York Times live
conversation series Time 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 Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher and international bestselling author of
Sapiens and Homo Deus. Harari'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 even is Bari Weiss, a writer and editor for the New York Times opinion section and winner
of the Reason Foundation's 2018 Bastiat 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 moderate Bari Weiss
and our special guest, Yuval Noah Harari. (audience applauding) - Well, welcome fellow
apes or maybe I should say our future cyborgs and data cows. Yuval, 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 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, 21 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 use,
maybe the lucky few of you are in this room, will
become kind of like gods and the rest of us will become useless, the kind of left behinds and I know I'm gonna be one of them
'cause 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? - 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? - [Harari] Hmm? - Is that why? - There are many reasons why, but we can spend the entire evening just talking about it. 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 part of it. - Could be. But in any case, talking about
this issue of the future, it should be very, very
clear that the future is not deterministic. Nobody has any idea how the future or how the world will
actually look like in 50 years and it's still up to us. Yes, technology's going
to change the world in dramatic ways. That's 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 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? - There are 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, a simple case. Like autonomous weapon systems. Killer robots. It's not such a difficult to understand, this is a very bad idea to develop autonomous weapon systems,
but how do you prevent it? If the U.S. unilaterally
says okay, we are banning the development of autonomous
weapon systems in the U.S., 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 okay, we
are sticking with our ban, 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 robots, it's far more difficult with these 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 says these 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
on or a dictatorial one. Correct? - It's difficult. - How could you possibly have that trust with a 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's been
happening over the last two or three years. Five years ago, almost
nobody cared about it, but over the last two or three years, more and more governments around the world realize that this is happening, this is big. This is the key, perhaps to
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 U.S. and China. I think what you are doing
right now is not working. (laughing) But this is a key issue 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 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, Arduanism, Putinism, Trumpism, Brexit, seems like nationalism is kicking ass and transnationalism or
at least attempts at it, like the European Union and
the euro and even the U.N. Have sort of failed. How do you explain that? - Well, first of all nationalism is still much, much weaker than
it was say a century ago. You just need to count bodies. A century ago, Europeans
were killing each other by the millions over national conflicts in the first World War. Today, if you look at
Europe, for all the talk about the rise of nationalism,
very few Europeans are willing to kill to be killed for nationalist ideals. For me, as a historian, the most amazing thing about Brexit was
that only one person, as far as I know was killed. A British MP who was murdered
by some right win fanatic. And you know a century or two ago, a question like this
should Britain be a part of a European block, 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 it a few times, they had to raise an army and they had to fight pitch battles and have their cities
being burned by armies 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 see 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 a bad idea, it isn't, it has contributed enormously to humanity for centuries. It's just that today,
the three big problems of human kind, 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
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. - And isn't nationalism a way to sort of harness tribalism, which can be extremely violent and dangerous, as
you read about in your book? - It harnesses it, but it's
a very different phenomena. 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 a 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 shift, you know them. The chief characteristic of nations, which appeared only in the
last 5,000 years or so, 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 U.S. you have a few more millions and the same thing, 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 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 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 to a hundred million
people you don't know, that's very difficult. To go from a hundred million
people you don't know to 8 billion people you don't know, that's far easier. - I want to talk a little bit about, before we get to your current book, just a question that I've been struck by in 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, 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 with the first
book, I didn't think that many people would read it. It was originally written
for college students and high school students in Israel. So, I kind of took
liberties that looking back, yes, it was maybe a bit frightening, but I didn't think it would reach millions of people around the world and my fellow scholars, I don't know what they say
about me behind my back, but, you know, at least to my face, most of them are very nice. - Now they have to suck up to you. - And very encouraging. I think that many of them are happy that somebody is taking this job of bridging, 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 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 the public arena
that the public debates, then 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
philosophers have been preparing for this moment for thousands of years. - So why are so many of
them refusing to bite? - That's the mystery, that's the problems. 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 is suddenly very, very urgent. Things that weren't very
urgent in ancient Athens, they are now extremely
urgent and what you're seeing is that the engineers are taking over. Philosophers, maybe they
are just too patient. Well, we've been debating
this for 5,000 years. We can continue to debate
it for 5,000 years more. But engineers are impatient. When you design a self-riding car, you can't wait 5,000 years. You need to decide ethical questions and philosophical questions now or in the next year or two. - So, should these
Silicon Valley companies be hiring resident philosophers? - They are doing it. Or in different ways. Either engineers that reinvent
themselves as philosophers. There are some philosophers who are also, at least type of philosophers
who are being hired or play a part in this. And I think, again, if you
want to study something really practical in the 21st century, philosophy is a good bet. More than ever before, more than many of the other things that people are studying. There are so many things that AI is going to do better than humans
in the coming years. Maybe eventually also philosophy, but this will be one of the last fields to fall to automation. - So before you talked
about the three challenges facing humanity, biotech,
name the three for me again. - The three big problems are 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? - Oof. 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. - I want to talk about the
sort of power of story, which is something that it's 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, 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 a storytelling 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, at least
the powerful and successful scholarly establishments
reached the conclusion that social harmony is much
more important than truth. Truth is like an acid. 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 a quest to find the ultimate reality, then yes, you go that
way, but you can't build 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
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, they are just myth. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so there is also, human
rights 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 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. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. - [Harari] Yes. - Seems to me that's a really good story. I mean it brought more
people out of poverty. I mean so, but you throw
a lot of cold water on the notion that sort of,
let's just call it liberalism can still hold up, can
still be a compelling story. - A story needs to adapt and be compatible with
present day realities and the realities change. The technological realities, the economic realities
change and the stories that 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 technological changes. - But how do technological changes render the story that I just told you? - Okay, so let's take the central ideal of liberty and freedom and the idea that each individual is
endowed with free will and I make my own decisions freely and this is the highest
authority in the world. In a world where nobody has the technology to hack 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, blind faith in free will
becomes more and more dangerous because the easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe
that all their decisions reflect some mysterious free will. So why should we care about, I don't know, about 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 have the shield that protects us against all these type 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. (laughing) And 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, it's 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 of the relevant data. We never had it before, so
it wasn't a big problem, but now or very soon we will have it. - 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 demand a lot of
changes in many fields. The most obvious is the legal field. The idea that we punish
people for making bad choices, that should be out. (laughing) - Okay, okay. - We still need the legal system. - So Bill Cosby couldn't
control his choices? - But we don't punish him for bad choices. 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 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 it calculation, 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 cure 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 seems to me that it could very easily. - No, 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. - That could easily lead to that in a culture in which we have tons of data about everyone and know everything. - Yes, that's one of the dangers. But this danger will
not go away just because we say oh, we believe in the 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 people. - Convincing people. A compelling story and a good story is totally different things. - Okay, okay. - 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 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 truths will be there forever, because it's who you really are. You 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? 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
and what is 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 corporation cannot suffer. Currency, like the dollar or the euro, even if it loses half its
value, it doesn't suffer. All these things are 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 do hope that people will retain this ability
because it's so difficult. I mean, take a much simpler example. If you think about football or at least what is in most of the
world known as football. How do you call it here? - Soccer, Yuval. - Okay, sorry. So I'm still under the
impression of the World Cup, so 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 ane enjoy football,
you need to convince at least 22 people to
believe in this story for 90 minutes, but the
danger is that if somebody gets caught up in the story too much, like a football hooligan and start 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're not a
football hooligan yourself, it's easy to see 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 corporation or 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 wrote the. - I feel like it's a
stealth argument for like Buddhist meditation in a way. - 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 the
last chapter of the book is about meditation, I was
afraid that people will come away with the impression
that what I am 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 be the solution. I don't think, especially
because I meditate myself, I meditate for two hours every day, I go every year for 60
days, the Pasimer retreat. - Following meditation. - I know how difficult it is, I am under no illusions
that 8 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. (audience laughing) 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. 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, than in the name of any
other idea in human history. It's the most, the
religion 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 and in all kinds of places. It's just humans are so difficult. Things that look
wonderful on a small scale when you're just in some
cave in the Himalayas or a small ashram with
a couple of other monks or in the 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 of 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 imagining, I
mean, that's what makes me 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, I mean the nation was even a stretch. - A very big stretch, yeah. - So how are we gonna
get to the global thing? - Well, 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 maybe the only way to
solve our major problems doesn't guarantee we'll 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 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 was 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. - [Bari] How so? - Well, first of all, if it
ended in a different way, I wouldn't be here, and
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 direct 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 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 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, though, what are you getting at
when you're saying that? - No, I'm just saying
that earlier when we spoke about this, how can we
get cooperation between different political
systems, so when I look at. - 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 the Soviet leadership or 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 Ceausescu, 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 you see that you are losing,
when Hitler saw that he was losing, he didn't say
okay, so it didn't work. Let's give up. (laughing) - He didn't? - 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 conventional ideals. 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 name every fancy person
at the Devos and Aspen crowds, does it say something about
the nature of your ideas, that they're not as
conventional and disturbing as they seem, or are
you just very, very good at promoting yourself. (audience laughing) - Well, first of all, I don't
know much about promotion. All the credit for the
success of this really goes to my husband and
to my team who support. I just know how to write books. But everything else really that the genius behind it is my husband. And whether the success
means that actually my ideas are not really
disturbing for the old older, yes, this is a possibility
that you think about. And, you know, when your books fail, it's very easy to tell yourself, oh, they failed because
they are so revolutionary that people refuse to, so it's actually a badge of honor. I fail, it means that
I'm telling the truth and nobody's willing to listen. What it says about, I'm
myopic, I think they're good. - They are, 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 sort of in my view, I don't know if you'd
identify with this word, but the sort of anilism of some 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 realize that you read the book in a completely different way than I intended. But it's a very, very old experience of authors and writers that
once the book is out there, you have no control or very little 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, and time will tell. I mean, what I try to do in my books is above all is to
change the conversation. I see my books, and
especially the last book, I mean 21 Lessons, it's not
really a book of lessons in the sense of these are the answers to the world's problems. 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 had Trump saying
things like the Mexicans will take your jobs. But he didn't say the robots
will take your jobs, why not? Even if it's not true,
who cares about the truth. 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 of Mexico, it won't help. We need to build a wall on
the border with California. This is where the real problem starts. Never suggested it. So the only thing they talked about with all regard to the AI and
the information revolution and all that was Hilary Clinton's emails. Now, emails, this is what 1990s. So it's like a delay of 20 years. In 2038, in 2036, they'll
be talking about AI, but we need to talk about AI now. And similarly I was watching
the Brexit 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 care about the world, okay, give back 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,
okay, but give it up, right? And when I watched 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 all so like, you know, 19th century stuff. And if you look at the
three big problems again, nuclear war, climate change,
technological disruption, how does Brexit help
us prevent nuclear war? It doesn't. How does Brexit help us
deal with climate change? It doesn't. How does Brexit help us regulate our 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 stronger you, 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 or with 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 bioengineering. - So knowing that these
are the three big ones, a young person comes to you who's about to enter university, what
do 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 will look like in 2050. Anybody that tells you that they know how the job market will
be and what kind of skills will be needed, they 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 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 maybe the most difficult problems will actually be psychological. - Like 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, and when you're 50 and
again when you're 60 because you'll have longer life spans and longer careers. So, emotional intelligence
and mental stability and 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
to teachers who are able 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? - Well, as I said in the
beginning, I think they are more relevant than ever before. 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 and the department of
economics and questions like what do you really
want to do with your life are going to become far more practical than ever before, given the
immense powers that technology is giving us. 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. Almost obviously 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 and the humanities in
general are maybe more important than ever before. - Before I ask Yuval one more 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 given your skepticism. - Cheesy questions are good. - Who are your heroes? - Ooh, who are my heroes? Mm. You mean like historical
heroes or personal heroes? - It's up to you. - Well, Gorbachev is,
as 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 owes him their lives and I really admire his
ability to give up power, which is so difficult for humans to do. For thousands of years
they just accumulate it to give it up, so
difficult, so I admire him. - Do you admire Reagan? - Never thought about it. (audience laughing) - I think he's one of the reasons that Gorbachev gave it up, I don't know. - Again it's a different,
yes, maybe without Reagan, Gorbachev would not need
to give up so much power, but still Gorbachev's job
was far more difficult than Reagan's job. There are many leaders who
can fight successful wars, but to be able to give up so much power when 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 okay, you don't want to give up power, the rations
are coming to your bunker, what do you do? Nobody could stall Moscow
in 1989, you couldn't. You couldn't send armed
divisions to conquer Moscow. It had to come from the Soviets. So, in this sense, I would still admire Gorbachev more than Reagan. - You want to pick one more or do you just want to
stick with Gorbachev? Then we'll go here? - I'll think about it more and if we have. - Yes, please. - Thank you very much. I've read all your books. Under the capillary of stories, religion seems to be especially
problematic right now and I'm just wondering any
comment you might have on that and going forward as a
society in the face of it. - Thank you. - Religion, well, it's
far, far less important than it used to be because
it gave up most, it lost, 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 a 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 engineers. If it doesn't work, also
okay, let's go to the priests. But the first, your first
call is to the doctor and religion retains 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
belongs to a single civilization when it comes to building a hospital or building a bomb, there is
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. (all laughing) They disagree about what to do with it. But they all agree that
E equals MC squared and if you enrich it in 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 more global cooperation. Religion could have been a source of global cooperation because
at least some religions, as far as universal
values, but in practice when you look at the world today, you see that in most cases
when religions are powerful, they have become the
handmade of nationalism. Whether it's Sunni Islam in Turkey or Shiite Islam in Iraq or Judaism in Israel or Catholicism in Hungary and Poland, or
orthodox Christianity in Russia, in most places where religion has an important role to play, it's simply the handmaid of nationalism supporting the state. So this is quite unfortunate, but this is the case. - Yes, go ahead. - Hello, Hugh Tran, 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 stories where
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 like have
those stories anymore? - Thank you. - I have difficulty hearing him because of the echo. - What are the things
that give you comfort. - Yeah, so if you're looking
at things, this better? - Yes. - Okay. So you mentioned about distinguishing fiction from reality. And I share that belief with you, but also there is 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
question number one is why do you think that distinction
is actually like worth it and question two, 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 up. That's the case and
this is why most people don't give them up, but hold onto them. For me personally and this is just me, I'm not saying that it
works for everybody. I take great comfort from reality. From just the ability
to see reality clearly. 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, too, 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. - Hi, I very much enjoyed
reading Sapiens and Homo Deus and the excerpt I read in 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 and college now
will largely be irrelevant. Given the rise of nano
degrees and coding boot camps and schools opportunities that are short and target 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 four-year
college degree is changing or are we sort of stuck with that and anything is going to be layered on top of that, because 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. - Yeah, I think the
entire educational system is facing a huge crisis
and it's really 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, 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 problems 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 an immense system and I think this is, like the tip of the iceberg that here we are encountering
for the first time this shock of the future world. And it's too early to
expect to have the answers. We hardly began the debate. But in my impression is
that the educational system, to be relevant 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? - Oh, where do I get my news from? I tend to read long books. I 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 hardly read newspapers at all. I just, I read books written by some New York Times journalists, but I tend not to follow
the immediate news cycle. I think more in centuries than in hours. So, this is a kind of answer,
again it works for me. - What's the most recent book you read that you loved that you'd recommend. - What's the 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's not considered news anymore. - I mean opioids are new if you're looking for some connection. - Actually, this is very,
one of the new books that I've just downloaded,
I listen to books on audio is about the opioid
epidemic now in the USA and the similarities between China in the early 19th Century
and the USA today, suddenly becomes quite striking. - Singularity. - Singularity. 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
meaningful about how the work would look like
a hundred years from now. This is how I understand the singularity, not in terms of some big bang or loads of physics or something like that, but point beyond which
you just can't look. So when you look to the
past, many physicists call the Big Bang a singularity. 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 floating a billion years in the future but
maybe 50 or 100 years in the future, which you
simply cannot look beyond our imagination things
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. - Hi. You mention 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 historian, and as a researcher, which I would say a majority of the world does not think like that
and it would include other scientists,
historians and researchers. What inspired you to, one, learn that distinction for yourself? From my knowledge the
only person who I know is that adamant is Winnard Earhardt 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 as many questions as possible. - It's just that 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 the point of all that. And you get again and again
all these fictional stories and I just got really fed up with it. - Yeah. - Yes, this is a question about stories. One of the stories that is being told now seems to be coming from the opposite end of AI stories and that's the neuroscience of the emotions. The neuroscience of emotions, of course, stresses the body and feeling and I find I would like to ask you
about the contradiction, one of your solutions
that people should become more aware of themselves,
but if they do not think of themselves as
bodies, if they think of themselves as mental apparatuses which could be manipulated
technologically. Then you have a tremendous
contradiction there. I would just ask you to address this. - Great question. - Well, I think we are
very far from understanding consciousness and the mind
and our mental experiences, but we are making tremendous and in a ways frightening advances in
understanding what is happening on the level of the body and of the brain. And very often in history,
the history of science, this huge gap between
our ability to manipulate and our ability to
understand the consequences of the manipulations and we are becoming frighteningly good at
deciphering and manipulating human emotions while
we are not good at all in really understanding the human mind and what he 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 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 the emotions and thoughts and so forth and this gap may result in an internal ecological collapse of our mental system. - [Audience Member] Thank you. - I am so sorry, this has
to be our last question and I'm seeing people that I know and want to allow them to ask questions, but hopefully you can find him after. - I'll keep it very short. So, you talked about lot
about internal threats to humanity, the three
that you mentioned tonight and in the books and just a fun question, I'm very curious to know
about your personal belief. Had there been extraterrestrial
life that threats humanity, will that unite us? - I couldn't hear, the
threat, will they unite us. - So I'm saying, your personal thoughts, I know that you're a historian, but we talked about the future, too. Had there been, if we found that there is extraterrestrial life. - Oh, extraterrestrial life. - I'm sorry, yes. And they come not necessarily
with an olive branch, but is that a possibility
that that can unite humanity. - Could that unite us? - Well, um. - Thank you. - It is a possibility. I don't know of any scientific evidence for the existence of life
outside planet earth, but statistically it sounds quite provable 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 like a 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 give Yuval Noah Harari another
round of applause. (audience applauding) Thank you so much. - Thank you, it's been great. - 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. - [Yuval] Thank you.
