Yuval Noah Harari | #ForoTelos2020

[Music] what better time than now to talk to our guests today at furo tell the best-selling israel author and historian jival noah harari he has a dream and a goal to make big ideas accessible to everyone and now he has a new book coming out sapiens a graphic history it's a radical adaptation of his best-selling book sapiens into a graphic novel narrated by the cartoon alter ego of harare another person of harabi mr hari thank you so much for being with us today i will thank you for inviting me yeah i would like to know how did the idea of this book come out i mean what made you decide to turn sappings into graphic novel i was looking for new ways to reach new audiences to make science accessible to more people and then these two artists danielle and david they approached me with the idea of producing a graphic novel together and i really liked it i really liked their ideas and we you know we collaborated on this project it was i think the most fun project i ever worked on i couldn't do it myself i i don't know how to draw i draw like a five-year-old kid and they had so many ideas how to do it so you know they suggested let's do this chapter like a detective like a detective movie uh you know the story of how humans caused the extermination of most of the big animals of the planet let's do it like a whodunit mystery we'll have a detective detective lopez and she goes around the world investigating these serial killers who is killing all the big animals and then they had this idea of telling the evolution of the different human species because homo sapiens is not the only human species you have neanderthals and you have the dwarf species from flores island so let's do this as a reality tv show you have all the different species competing who is be the winner of the reality tv show of evolution and this it was a lot of fun to basically break all the academic conventions of how you write a normal history book or normal science book and try these different things as you say there are too many different ways to tell a story to explain science with this graphic novel you break again at the academic conventions how does it feel what was the more enjoyable part of all the process i think it's really for me the fun was about learning new ways to tell the old stories and also dealing with questions that i could previously just ignore you know when you write a text um you you ignore so much like you write that neanderthals had sex with sapiens and this is something we know now scientifically that there were fertile sexual relations between sapiens and neanderthals something like 40 50 000 years ago so you and me and everybody who sees us now probably have some neanderthal dna in in their body now you when you write it you don't have to imagine how they actually look like but when you draw it in a graphic novel you have to decide many things so first of all who who is is it a sapience man and any young little woman or is it the other way around and what is their skin color and what is their hair color and what kind of hairstyle they have now in a text if you don't want to engage with this question you just ignore it but in a graphic novel you can't draw a general human who has no gender and no skin color and or have a hairstyle so you have to go back to the scientific literature and investigate what do we know about these questions do we know whether it was sapience men with neanderthal women or the other way around and do we know how they actually looked like so actually we do we know that neanderthals probably at least some of them had lighter skin color in hair color than sapiens who came from africa so um it was for me a kind of big surprise to realize that all these things that i've been talking about and writing about for many years actually when you have to draw them you have to go back to square one and do your research again of course your aim is to interest readers who don't usually engage with science and history and how do you do it because that's not an easy goal first of all you need to remember that most people think in stories not in numbers or statistics or models when professors at the university argue then they usually like the big weapons are the numbers the statistics the the graphs all these things but it doesn't work with the general public it's it's too boring frankly so you need to find a way how to translate it into a story into a narrative which would be captivating and interesting and do it without abandoning scientific accuracy i mean if you abandon scientific accuracy then it's much easier of course you can invent anything you want but then you miss the main point then you have just you know more fake news so how to find this balance of still being loyal to the values of science and accuracy and facts and nevertheless managed to wrap it up in in an interesting way and you know what makes it difficult is very often there is no agreement among scientists there are discussions there are disagreements so how do you convey that and one of the methods we use we have several characters of scientists in the book and they sometimes argue and they sometimes have discussions and this again makes it fun because uh it's it's human interaction it's not something called and distance that you write well there is one theory that says x and there is another theory that says why no you create this funny scientists who have a particular way of talking and they look in a particular way and they are arguing with each other and this is much more interesting i do we need to go back in time to understand our world today to understand the big picture certainly almost anything you want to understand you have to go back in time whether it's again gender relations i mean so many of the arguments today about gender and sex in the 21st century they are based on what we think is natural for homo sapiens for our species but the thing is who knows how families looked like 50 000 years ago who knows what sexual relations were like 50 000 years ago people assumed that there was always this traditional family one man one woman two and a half kids a dog this was always the case and that's obviously not so you know when you look at biology you don't see a single uh family structure among all our ape relatives gibbons are the only ones who have these kind of long-term monogamous relationships among common chimpanzees you have more of a hippie commune there are very few long-term relationships between just one but between just two individuals among bonobo chimpanzees it's the females who actually dominate society and lesbian relations between females are extremely important and gorillas have another structure they have there you have one male with a huge harm of many females now which of these models is most similar to ancient humans we are not sure again we go to anthropology and we see a lot of different family structures we go to archaeology okay forget about all this let's find direct evidence how did families look like 50 000 years ago there is almost no evidence you know we have a lot of evidence from 50 000 years ago we have stone tools but they don't tell us about family relations we have cave out you would have expected you would have hoped that somewhere in altamira or la score one of these caves you would have a family picture there is none you know they draw elephants and mammoths and bears and horses everything no families there are a few human figures it's not utterly that they didn't paint humans didn't they did draw humans they never drew images that we can say look that's a family why not what does it tell us so this is obvious how relevant this is to the discussions today about gender it's the same if you think about epidemics which are now you know like everywhere in the news and it's interesting to realize that epidemics actually didn't exist in the stone age epidemics began with the agricultural revolution about 10 000 years ago because most infectious diseases that we suffer from they came from domesticated animals from chickens and pigs and cows and so forth hunter-gatherers in the stone age didn't have any domesticated animals and even if they caught a virus from a wild animal like some bat and transferred a a coronavirus to a hunter-gatherer 50 000 years ago it would not have caused an epidemic because people lived in small mobile groups 20 people 50 people moving around so maybe if you got ill you could infect 10 other people maybe the whole band all 50 people got infected let's say 12 died and that was it that was over you start seeing epidemics only when people settle down in villages and towns and cities with uh trade networks and then you start seeing that a disease that starts in one place spreads and infects and kills millions of people so even to understand something like kovid it's a good idea to know something about life in the stone age as you explain in this graphic novel one of the characteristics of homo sapiens is that we if i can say we think that we are the cleverest person in the room could it be one of our greatest weakness yes we tend to overestimate our abilities and our wisdom in in many ways in fact what makes us so powerful what makes us the dominant species on the planet is not our individual genius as an individual you a human being is not superior to a chimpanzee or a neanderthal or a pig or even a dog if you leave me alone on some island with the chimpanzee i think the chimpanzee will do much better than me what really makes us powerful is the ability to cooperate in very large numbers we today have a trade network of almost 8 billion people chimpanzees can cooperate maybe 50 chimpanzees chimpanzees nothing more than that and what makes it possible for us to cooperate in very large numbers is not our intelligence it's our imagination it's our ability to invent and believe in fictional stories many of them are not true at all it doesn't matter if you have a million people that believe in the same story even if the story is a ridiculous conspiracy theory it doesn't matter if they all believe the same story they are able to cooperate effectively to follow the same rules to follow the same laws and this is our superpower in the graphic novel we personify this we created this image of a superhero in doctor fiction and she personifies this human superpower to in create and spread and believe fictional stories and you know it's even forget about religion which is like the obvious example if you look at economics even today our economy is based on fictional stories corporations for example google facebook uh tesla all these corporations they are just what lawyers call illegal fiction they the only place they exist is in the stories we invented and tell each other and it's the same with money money is not an objective reality it's not like bananas that have actual value you can eat them and and sustain your body money today is you know you have these colorful pieces of paper and even this is quite where 95 percent of money in the world today is not even pieces of paper it's just electronic data in computers during the covet crisis the eu and the united states and china and many other countries they created trillions trillions of euros and dollars and yens out of nothing they didn't even bother to print dollars or euros they just go into the computer they add a zero somewhere and a trillion euros emerge out of nothing it works as long as everybody believes it that i can go to you know a supermarket i don't even carry a wallet with me i just pass this credit card and what it does is it transfers some bits of information from one file in the computer to another file in the computer and the person gives me bananas that i can eat this is absolutely amazing you know chimpanzees will never be able to do it and it's not because we are smart it's because we are willing to believe these fantastic stories that uh lawyers and uh priests and economists tell us it's it's basically the same the same principle uh cooperation is our superpower as humans but do you feel that our institutions our governments have forgotten that cooperation now in the midst of the pandemic you know it depends on your perspective during kovid we see in many countries a dangerous weakening of trust in institutions and this is also the result of politicians in previous years that deliberately as a political strategy undermined trust in the media in the academy in the authorities of the state and now we see how dangerous it is because the entire system runs on trust everything in our entire world is built on trust between strangers you know as hunter-gatherers 50 000 years ago you lived in a very small band you actually knew everybody around all the other people so you trusted individuals that you knew in the modern world we trust in personal institutions and we cooperate with billions of strangers and if that trust disappears the entire world will collapse the whole human civilization will collapse luckily i think we are still in a relatively good situation it may not look like it from the news but we have more trust today and we cooperate better today than in almost any previous time in human history certainly more than a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago you know a thousand years ago there was no global currency like the dollar that people everywhere trusted in the middle ages when the black death spread from china to britain there was no trust in common scientific and medical institutions there was no data shared between people in china and people in india and people in europe everybody tried to do their own thing and nobody succeeded nobody in the world understood what was causing millions of people to die we now have the scientific institutions and even though we saw a lot of attacks on them in recent years both from politicians and from all these conspiracy theories there is still an amazing amount of trust you know we saw it in april that when the scientists recommended to close down all the churches in easter even the pope followed the recommendation of the scientists it said to people don't come to church stay at home and he conducted this online mess in an empty vatican so you know in the middle ages no people didn't know what was happening they thought it was punishment from god so everybody ran to the churches to pray and this increased the infection of course now even the church has so much trust in scientific institutions that when the scientists say close down the church they do it so i think we are in a better situation there is still a lot to do i mean we are far from perfect but we are in a better situation than probably in any previous time in human history and we are in a better situation too because now we realize the importance of having a good scientific education for everybody but unfortunately we tend to forget the lessons we learned do you think that in the near future we will give the science and the scientific education the important place that really has i hope so i mean you know in in this crisis everybody now realizes the importance of understanding epidemics understanding what viruses are how to stop them and i hope that when the crisis is over we will carry the same kind of attitude towards other problems like climate change and ecological collapse that the same way that we now look up to the doctors and the epidemiologists to explain what is happening and what should we do later on and yeah of course even now we can start but later on when the this crisis is over we'll also listen to the climate scientists when they warn us about what's happening around the world two years ago you wrote forget programming the best skill to teach children is reinvention my feeling is that the statement is now truer than ever yeah it's i mean things are speeding up i mean we expected previously that the change the radical changes in the job market will take 10 years 20 years 30 years but kovid is accelerating it that so many things are being automatized digitalized moved online entire industries are collapsing or disappearing when the crisis is over some jobs will come go back to normal but a lot of jobs will disappear they will not come back now there will be new jobs i don't believe that we'll just see and the elimination of jobs and humans will have nothing to do there is always almost always will will be new jobs the big problem is ha to have the skills necessary for these new jobs and because we can't we don't know in advance we don't know how the job market would look like in 2040 we can't teach kids today the skills they will need in 2014. what we can do is give them the ability to keep learning and and retraining and reinventing themselves because this is the one thing they will absolutely need in the 21st century and and it's also vital to realize is that we are not facing a single revolution it's not like there'll be the big ai revolution of 2025 when lots of jobs just disappear a lot of other jobs are created we have like five difficult years or ten difficult years people have to retrain finding new jobs and eventually everything calms down and we have a different job market it won't be at all like this because ai is nowhere near its full potential by 2025 there will be big changes as many jobs are automated but ai will continue to improve there are many things it can't do in 2025 25 but will be able to do in 2035 so all kinds of jobs that remained safe in the first wave of automation they will disappear in the second wave or the third wave and even some of the new jobs will change or vanish and again there will be new jobs even after that but you will have to retrain and reinvent yourself again and again and this will be a huge financial burden you know you don't have a job you need to spend a year retraining who is supporting you in the meat in the meantime it will be an even bigger psychological burden because to think that you have to start again and again at age 40 again at age 50 again at age 60 many people will find it extremely difficult psychologically it's stressful so we will need a lot of support from governments in both financially but also psychologically to help people live in such a hectic way and my biggest fear is that this will create a huge inequality in the world some countries will benefit enormously from the automation revolution they will become even richer than they are now and they will have the resources to support and retrain their population so they will continue to to become even wealthier every revolution will make them even more powerful and then other countries will remain behind they won't have the resources to retrain their workforce in the first wave of the automation revolution and then they will become even poorer and weaker so obviously they will not be able to deal with the second and third waves so we'll see the world splitting in the 20th century there was a convergence you had the industrial powers of the 19th century like britain and france and the usa and japan and you had the developing countries and gradually the developing countries caught up with the leading industrial powers china and india caught up with the united states and britain and what enabled them to catch up is cheap manual labor this was their main asset we don't have educated people we don't have complex industrial industrial facilities we have a lot of cheap manual labor that's our ticket to progress in the 21st century cheap manual labor is is becoming irrelevant it's the easiest thing to automate all the workers in in the textile factories so we might see a growing divergence as some countries like the usa or like china will become immensely rich and powerful they will lead this new ai revolution and other countries will remain completely behind will maybe face economic collapse and political domination now we are listening that we should learn to live with coronavirus what is clear is that we need adaptability and maybe resilience in some ways adaptability and resilience were the skills that make sapiens successful so we are yeah as a species we are extremely adaptable and resilient so this is why there is hope i mean not everything is lost i think we can adapt to the new realities of kovid and we can adapt to the new conditions of the 21st century the problem is that humans in the process of adaptation they often take some time and experimentation you know if you think about the previous big revolution the industrial revolution ultimately we learned how to use the forces the powers of modern industry to benefit most humans for the average person today even in poor countries enjoys better health care more food better life than the average person before the industrial revolution but in the middle we had a learning process people did all kinds of experiments how to build industrial societies and some of these experiments were absolutely horrifying you had nazi germany you had the soviet union uh you had the two world wars the holocaust imperialism all these were in a way experiments in how to build an industrial society and eventually we learned what to avoid and what is the best way but we can't afford any more failed experiments in the 21st century if we have a third world war with the technology we have today we won't survive it and if somebody comes up with a new totalitarian system this time not like hitler based on trains and radio but a new totalitarian system for the 21st century based on artificial intelligence and bioengineering this would be far far worse than anything hitler or stalin or franco did and we just can't afford such failed experiments so we have to get it right from the beginning and for that we need some kind of global cooperation on this and this is very difficult because at present you see less and less cooperation between different countries [Music] now we are overwhelmed with information and as you say people need the abilities to make sense of this information because sometimes it's too much how do we know whom or what to trust you know the key is to trust in institutions not in individual people nobody can know everything most of what i know about the stone age or about the 20th century it's from the research of other people and why do i trust this research because i don't know the people who wrote the books and articles i trust the institutions the universities the academic journals the scientific conferences and uh i think therefore it's important to build good institutions it's the same with the media you know you can't just go and search information online about current events how do you know who to trust you can't go personally and see everything that is happening or interview the journalists who wrote it so ultimately it's about which journals do you trust which tv stations so we need to build good institutions in different fields medicine science the media because ultimately this is the guarantee of receiving good and reliable information and you know i i would say that [Music] the main problem with um all these fake news and conspiracy theories that are spreading is that they simplify the world too much people and i'm also included we are lazy we don't like to think too much we don't like to think too hard so it's when somebody comes along with a simple theory that explains everything it's very tempting because it saves us a lot of time and effort you know you think that there is just this group of people billionaires or freemasons or whoever who sit in some secret room and they control everything if you believe that then everything becomes simple like the war in syria you don't need to study middle eastern politics it's just part of the their conspiracy to take over the world and 5g technology you don't even need to understand what it means 5g what is 5g you don't need to know anything about the technology you just and oh this is another part of the big conspiracy and covey 19th it wasn't a virus from a bat it was again part of the conspiracy so this is a sign of danger when you have something that simplifies the world so much be careful because you know from your own personal experience the world is complicated you know you try to control 10 people in your family you try to organize a birthday party you try to you're on the school board of your local school how difficult it is to get 50 people to do something so you think that 10 billionaires in some room they can control the whole world 8 billion people that's crazy that's impossible so be careful about things that simplify reality uh too much that's one sign of danger another sign of danger is people who know everything that um you know as a scientist you know that for me one of the one of the signals that this is science is that there is areas of ignorance but we don't know that you know you look at at the stone age and you ask what was what was family structure like 50 000 years ago we don't know we are still working on it we're still researching it when somebody comes with some this kind of complete theory which explains everything this is usually a religion or a cult or a conspiracy theory these are the people who usually refuse to admit ignorance let me read you something about coronavirus the storm will pass but the choices we make now could change our lives for the years to come we must act quickly and you wrote this half a year ago how are we doing it depends i mean in some in some ways we are doing okay i mean we and scientifically we have managed to understand we now understand the epidemic far far better than at the beginning so we have i'm confident that we have now all the scientific knowledge we need in order to overcome the epidemic i don't know how i'm not a doctor i'm not an epidemiologist but as a historian when i look at it and i compare it to previous epidemics like aids or like the big flu epidemic of 1918 or the black death i think we are much doing much much better now in other fields there is a lot of reason to be worried because you don't see global cooperation on things like a global economic plan economically we have where the big storm is still ahead of us you know countries are spending trillions of money like there is no tomorrow but tomorrow will come we are headed towards a very big economic crisis again in some countries worse than in others and it's a global crisis and you don't see any global plan of action there is no leadership the impression is that there are no adults in the room you don't see the g7 or the g20 or anybody coming with a global plan and this is most worrying about poor developing countries that just don't have the resources to cope with this crisis i'm not so worried about the usa or germany or japan they'll be okay somehow but many countries could completely collapse and we don't see the kind of global cooperation that um that we could have because again we are not in the middle ages we have immense knowledge and power we just seem not to have the political wisdom how to use this power and what about europe how do you think we are dealing with this crisis and with the economic crisis that we are in the future in the origin again i think europe is doing relatively okay everything considered um especially as i'm you know some people admire i don't know china about the efficient way to deal with the epidemic i admire europe for the balanced way that uh it manages to keep democratic values it manages to keep the human rights and freedom of citizens even in the midst of a pandemic and that's very important because you know the pandemic isn't everything there are other important things in life that we have to balance them against uh the pandemic i think the main thing about the european union is that europeans really need to decide what they want from the european union they need to align their expectations with their powers of the european union you know people on the one hand complain that the eu is not doing enough and at the other time they complain that the eu has too much power so you need to decide one way one thing is to say well we don't want a strong european union we want it to remain a very loose organization of completely independent countries in which case you can't expect the eu to do much in a crisis like kovid if the eu remains a weak conglomerate of countries then in a time of a severe crisis like kovid it goes back to the national governments they are the only ones that can deal with it on the other hand europeans can decide no we want a strong european union that will be able to deal effectively on a collective level with a crisis like kovit and that's fine but that means you need to give up a lot of the powers of national governments and transfer it to the eu to give an example you know medical equipment so you could say okay we want to establish we don't want to rely on medicines or masks produced in china or india because in a time of crisis maybe they block the shipments now you can have a european system of producing medical equipment which would be a very good idea it will save a lot of redundancies instead of 27 countries each establishing its own local production you can have a european production of essential medical equipment but for this to work in a crisis the european union needs the power to decide where the equipment goes if there is let's say a factory in germany and the european union decides okay now ship masks or medicines to spain the german government can't have a veto right no no no this is in our national territory we want the equipment to ourselves so we stop the shipment if you do that then obviously spain would like to have factories on its own territory and portugal would want the same and italy would want the same and then you are back to 27 different uh so so you need to decide that's i think politicians should be frank with the voters they should come to the voters to the citizen and tell them look this is the choice what kind of european union you want and align your expectations with the actual powers of the union as you have written mankind need to make a choice between disunity or global solidarity and sometimes i'm afraid that we have already made a choice i don't know what do you think and what can do a citizen do with this i think it's not too late i mean we have seen forces of this unity becoming stronger in the world in the recent years but it's not a deterministic it's not inevitable we can change direction i think the most important thing to realize is that there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism between national loyalty and global solidarity and global cooperation some politicians tell people that there is a contradiction you have to decide you have to choose nationalism and reject globalism but that's the complete mistake there is no contradiction there because nationalism is not about hating foreigners nationalism is about loving your compatriots and caring about them and there are many situations when in order to take good care of your compatriots you must cooperate with foreigners and an epidemic is an obvious example you know if the germans now develop a vaccine it will be crazy of spanish patriots to say no no we don't want a foreign german vaccine we are waiting until we have a patriotic spanish vaccine invented by spanish scientists and only then we take it it's it's it's ridiculous so we don't need really to make this choice you can have both the same way you can be loyal to your family and loyal to your profession and loyal to your country at the same time you know sometimes there are conflicts and sometimes you prefer this sometimes you prefer that but people have they are not kind of monolith that they have at the same time different identities it's the same you can be loyal to your country and cooperate with other countries about common interests you know global warming you can't stop it on a national level nuclear war you can't prevent it just by your country doing something you're thinking about the ai revolution which is coming to regulate artificial intelligence would be impossible on a national level it doesn't matter what the spanish government decides to regulate ai if the chinese or the americans are doing something else then very soon the spanish also will have to break their own regulations because nobody would like to stay behind if you think in terms of let's say weapons producing autonomous weapon systems killer robots now you can ban killer robots in spain you can ban killer robots in the whole of europe but what happens if the russians and the chinese and the americans in the israelis are speeding along producing better and better killer robots until the moment comes when the uh generals of the spanish army and the german army and whatever come to the government and says look there's been a military revolution our army is absolutely useless if we don't go into the game of killer robots i mean you can give us swords and and bows and errors to be the same so obviously the europeans will have to do the same the only way to regulate these kinds of technologies if you have some kind of global cooperation and it's not too late to have this kind of global cooperation it's not too late that's a great message uh let's talk uh briefly about privacy good global pandemics a pandemic like this drive the development of some kind of big broader biometric are you more concerned now than nine months ago much more concerned you know i had this idea that we will have a big battle in the 21st century between health and privacy and health is likely to win people will give up their privacy but it's now happening much much faster than was expected and you know we need surveillance to fight the epidemic not against it but we should be extremely careful about it because it can also serve as the basis for the worst authoritarian regime that ever existed you know if you have mass biometric surveillance that means that for the first time in history somebody can follow everybody all the time and know not only what they do and what they buy and who they meet they know what you feel if now you know people are now watching our conversation online now let's say you have a biometric bracelet on your arm that is constantly monitoring your blood pressure your your heart rate your brain activity this data means that somebody can know not only that you are watching this conversation online they know how you feel every moment because feelings emotions they are biological phenomena just like disease just like fever the same technology that can tell some central authority that you now have 38 temperature and you have all the signs the biological signs of of corvid you have covered the same technology in principle can tell this authority that you are now angry or you are bored or you think it's all nonsense no no no this is all science fiction it will never happen so you what kind of power that means you know every corporation in the world and every dictator in the world would like to have this technology so the question is how do we employ the technology for good to fight epidemics for example because you know if you have this kind of system everybody wears a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day that monitors your your body no more epidemics not just covered but you stop all the epidemics flu the moment somebody gets flu immediately the bracelet picks up the the signs of flu and you're isolated and that's it normal flu so the potential for good is enormous but the potential for evil for building the worst totalitarian regime in history is also enormous so how do we benefit without falling victim to the uh dystopian scenarios that's the big question of our era we are at the end of our conversation but i want to access something about ecology because the coronavirus crisis shows us the power of nature but quite a paradox we seems to have forgotten to talk about ecology global warming climate change does it happen yeah it's still all around us it didn't go anywhere these problems are just getting worse and worse every day as i said earlier i hope that kovid will serve as a kind of wake-up call to humanity first of all that we need to listen to the scientists more but also that we need that we are still animals we are still part of the ecological system and you know in a way nature has you can say has been kind to us it first of all threw a very simple ball in our direction covey 19 as epidemics go is a relatively mild epidemic it's nothing like the black death it's nothing like i don't know aids which killed almost everybody was infected with aids in the 1980s died and so kind of nature is reminding us look what can happen from a relatively mild virus coming from a bat now there are much much worse things that are in store for us if we don't deal with the ecological problem if you think that covet is bad then a complete collapse of the ecological system it's far far worse so i hope that this crisis will in the end be a good thing that it serve kind of a wake-up call to humanity do something before it's too late is

Channel: Espacio Fundación Telefónica Madrid

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Length: 49min 25sec (2965 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020