Yuval Noah Harari in conversation with Terrence McNally at Live Talks Los Angeles

good evening you've all know a Harare received his PhD from the University of Oxford he's currently a lecturer at the Department of History the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his book sapiens a brief history of humankind has sold over 8 million copies and been translated into nearly 50 languages it's been recommended by your friend my friend and Barack Obama and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg it happens to currently be now the book came out in 2014 in the u.s. it is currently the number one selling paperback on both the LA Times best seller and the New York Times best seller list which I think that's remarkable his next one Amadeus a brief history of tomorrow has sold over 4 million and a review by Bill Gates of his latest book 20 left 21 lessons for the 21st century was the cover review in the New York Times Review of Books yesterday you've all we've had the pleasure of getting a little time together out there which is nice that doesn't always happen um I like folks to get a feel for the person beyond the work the idea is the book so can you tell us in your own words a bit about your path how you see yourself becoming who you are and the work you're doing today feel free to mention mentors turning points that kind of move that can take a long time to be brief I would say that I am I think I'm very lucky that I can just pursue the questions that really really interest me that interested me maybe all my life and you know I really realized how lucky it is that this is what I can do for a living and even have other people interested in in my findings in my answers in my questions it was a very surprising route I mean if you told me like ten years ago even six years ago what you just said I would this is completely impossible and it happened as things do I mean most one of the things I do know about history has a story in both the history of the whole of humankind and the history of individuals is how incredibly accidental it tends to be yes that you know you have a few things in history which are deterministic but they are they they tend to be few some of the biggest events and developments are completely accidental whether you think about the rise of Christianity or the Communist revolution in Russia a century ago these are extra unlikely events if you took the film of history and press the rewind button and played it again and did it a hundred times I don't think that quits anybody would have known what his Christianity more than twice out of these hundred times and the same is Lenin and I guess the same with my line if you really momentous if you rewind the the the the the movie of the last ten years of my life and in press play again then in most cases I guess I would still be some history professor specializing in medieval military history in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and nobody would have heard of me and also I I know that a lot of the credit for the success of the book I mean lots of people even if I wrote the book lots of people write good books which nobody ever heard of and without the support of my team and especially of my husband was also my manager I don't think that many people would have heard of me so it's it's it's good to be I think realistic a lot of these things yes now when you set out to read sapiens which was a departure for you as you said you were you were in more of a niche before that did you at what point in that process did you say this is not an academic book this is a book for the public oh when I wrote sapiens from the very beginning it was a book for the public but when I wrote it I thought the public meant college students and maybe high school students in Israel that's about it I wrote in in I wrote it in Hebrew it took like two three years to find an English publisher who was willing to to take it out so yeah I am part of I think part of the success of the book is also because I felt extremely free when I wrote it that's right because I didn't think that many people will actually write it so who cares right and then I mean III and I see that in other words the ambition was in some ways inversely proportional to who you think would read it yeah if you think that you know all these famous people and people all over the world and physicists and biology like I had the temerity the hutzpah who write about evolution about about economics like I still sometimes kind of take a peek at the chapter on capitalism and I don't know all these economies to reading this and now but that trick you couldn't trick yourself on the second book no with the second it was the opposite trick but then I was like so successful and who carries on you see there's a quote when I went to your home page there's a quote history began when humans invented gods and it will end when humans become gods yeah now you chose to put that boom right at the top what does that mean to you well that's the best summer of history in one sentence that I could come up with history began when humans invented gods in the sense that what makes us the dominant species on earth is our ability to cooperate in large numbers and what makes it possible for us to cooperate in loud numbers is the ability to invent stories and spread them around and make millions of people believe in them and stories about gods were for thousands of years some of the most efficient stories in getting people to cooperate and this is our huge advantage over the chimpanzees and was over the Neanderthals and all the other competition that we can invent these fictions and the chimpanzees can't and this is why we can cooperate in millions and the chimpanzees can't cooperate in more than a few dozen and then the second part is that in history ends when we become gods we are very close to the point when we are literally gods I mean I don't mean that as some kind of flowery metaphor but in the most literal sense if you think about the abilities that most mythologies are scribed to gods for thousands four of years then we are in the process of acquiring these abilities to ourselves especially the abilities to create to create life and all the things with all the stories we told about Zeus or about Vishnu or about Yahweh we are now on the verge of realizing them ourselves and when this happens this is no longer human beings and this is no longer history it's something it's still something it's not the apocalypse it's not the end of the world it's just something that goes completely beyond our imagination and completely beyond the logic of history as we have known it for the last 70,000 years so it history ends because there's such a disconnect with previous history I mean stories the story a story will continue to unfold I mean once once you go beyond that point by definition you as a human being as a homo sapien so I as a homo sapiens cannot imagine what is the next station if I can imagine it means it's the it's not the next station it's still the same thing it's a bit like I like to take an analogous case try to explain to a Neanderthal how Wall Street works you can't I mean it's just absolutely impossible for a lot more folks than the inner thoughts can understand how actually simple example it's obvious you can't explain it yeah so this is why Neanderthals are different for us and whatever replaces us it will be different from us much more than we are different from we are still very much like Neanderthals there are still there are tiny differences but if you look at our bodies at our brains at our basic emotional abilities that our social relations we are still Apes we are still very similar to Neanderthals to chimpanzees in all the rest of our cousins but whatever replaces Homo sapiens when we really master the new abilities of re-engineering life either on a on a organic basis with genetic engineering and things like that on an inorganic basis what every places us it will be much much more different in the sense that for example just to give one example I mean we and chimpanzees and also elephants and porcupines and whatever other animal you care to think about in order to to be in order to exist and to function we have to be in the same place at the same time all the parts of our body needs to be here you now for them to function i if you separate my hands and legs from my body they don't work anymore and I probably don't don't work anymore but if for example we solve the problem and there are many people working on that and we are making very fast progress on the problem of directly connecting brains to computers and therefore also brains to all kinds of Bionic parts you can have non organic limbs and non organic body parts which are disconnected from your body and they are still functioning if I have a bionic hand to detect the simplest example the grammar like everybody gives it in this context if I have a bionic hand connected to my brain through a direct brain computer interface this hand doesn't need to be attached to my body it can be in a different room a different City a different continent a different planet it all depends on how fast the connection you have but in principle I mean the idea which held for millions of years of evolution all the parts of your body must be here now that this is no longer the case and this is just one small simple example of the kind of differences we are looking at yeah so it's that it's that break in biology to some extent that really it's the break in in them in the basic rules of the game of life we have two systems of rules that governed life for four billion years you have organic biochemistry and you have natural selection and we are breaking both sets of rules at the same time we are replacing natural selection with intelligent design and we are breaking out of the realm of organic biochemistry and starting to engineer manufacture non-organic life so it's not just a break with the Neanderthals it's not just a break with the chimpanzees it's also a break with the dinosaurs it's a break with the amoebas it's a break with everything that lived on earth for four billion years right let me jump to the present yet another quote if somebody describes to you the world of the mid 21st century and it sounds like science fiction it's probably false but then if somebody describes to you the world of the 21st century and it doesn't sound like science fiction it is certainly false what that means to you well it's actually not my quote I took it from somebody I don't remember whom I read it somewhere and it was a very good quote it means that on the one hand it's almost impossible to envision the future say of 2050 and this is really the first time in history when we have no ability to envision the future of just 30 years from now we can't nobody really knows what the job market would look like what the political system would look like even to some extent what human relations would look like things like gender identity things like family structure things like just how you relate to other people these were the constants of history if you go back say a thousand years yes the many things you live say in England in 1018 there are many many things you don't know about England or Europe of ten fifty you know the Vikings might invade the Mongols might invade there might be a huge epidemic a third of the population might die all kinds of civil wars whatever but all this doesn't really change the fundamentals of societies when you look in 1018 towards the year 1015 you still envision that in 1015 most people will be peasants humanity will probably still divide itself into men and women and men will probably dominate women politics it can go in all kinds of ways but most probably you will still have a king in an aristocracy maybe a different dynasty maybe a different origin but you don't envision things like the dictatorship of the proletariat it's not going to by 10:15 so you have some some uncertainties but most of the basic foundations of societies and certainly the human body things like life expectancy this is not going to change now when we look to 2050 we have no idea so most of the forecasts are going to turn out to be false and I also set about my forecasts I definitely not a prophet I have no idea how it would look like the only thing I can say for certain it will be very different from now I try to map different possibilities largely in the hope of avoiding the worst possibilities it's a bit like you know like in sorcery that if you are able to say the name of somebody you have power over him over it whatever so like that I have maybe this infantile idea that if I can name the most dangerous possibilities just by bringing attention in awareness to these possibilities I can prevent them or I can help prevent them from happening maybe yes maybe no but we have no idea how it would look like the only thing we can be certain about that it will look like science fiction because it will be dramatically different from the world of today actually I I just had to convert interesting conversation about it last night more science fiction is probably in lacking an imagination to really envision the world of the mid to late 21st century and miss this maybe is not really the fault of scientific science fiction author it's also just an a matter of marketing that if you created a realistic movie about the world say of 2100 you would have very few people watching it today because most people will not be able to understand what they are seeing and will certainly not be able to relate to the characters and to their into that dilemmas and in conflict and so forth just as like Neanderthals will not find a lot of interest in most of our artistic creations now one thing you said there I you know I'm nodding I'm going and then wait while I don't assume that there is you know a universal unchangeable truth that is going to guide us through these changes it does still seem comfortable to me to imagine that there are certain things about the way we work that but these are the things we will be able to start changing exactly these things this is like the biggest change the biggest change will not be in the world outside the biggest changes will be in the new abilities to change the body and the brain so you know change the world outside we've been doing it for thousands of years we are you know cutting down forests or building cities of domesticated animals or building new social economic systems this has been done and we'll continue to do this of course but the real the really big changes will now be in humanity itself which haven't changed much for thousands of years I mean if you look back say to biblical times or you know to the Stone Age we are still the same humans but if you look forward a century or two ago this will be the biggest change and this is where again science fiction has its greatest problems because it if you looked at something like I don't know Star Trek so yes they have all these spaceships frankly the speed of light and laser guns and photon torpedoes and whatnot but the humans are exactly the same in foibles just they took these suburban Americans and stuck them in a spaceship but you know even if you look back in history you would find you know the Mongols or whatever there are far more strange than the people in Star Trek so you know and of course if you will be realistic and try to really envision what kind of beings will exist what year is Star Trek like 2200 something nobody would watch it because nobody could understand it Wow I want to take one step back yeah and just talk about the process of this book which is you say that this book was written in conversation with the public and so we'll get back into the meat of it but yeah how did that work for you because I assume the first two were not the first two were written in conversation with the farm of limited public yes like my student in university so I always had conversation with them and even a silent conversation like I say something and everybody like falls asleep it means that it's boring and and it shouldn't been probably shouldn't be in the book but twenty-one lessons was a much more lively conversation in the sense that it really reflects the kind of questions I was asked after I published sapiens and Homo dias so I had these kinds of interviews and I wrote pieces for all kinds of newspapers and I was getting a lot of emails from people so the questions that people asked me and they influenced the kind of subjects that I was dealing with and I would say something and somebody would say yes but what about that and what about this and and this is how many of the ideas in the book came about through these kinds of public conversations so they reflect also to some extent and you know it's a book about the present I mean sapiens what is a book about the past and the distant past and how models is a book is a book about the future in the distant future and these things don't necessarily interest most people I mean most people don't go about the day thinking about Neanderthals and cyborgs and but 21 lessons is a book about the present so it reflects the kind of things that grab people attention right now in the news or in conversations so I won't I'm gonna jump down to sort of the some of the headlines of the book and and many would see that not just this book but kind of your writings over the last these three books might see a bleak future Society divided between the ones who've become gods and the ones who are left behind lives lacking meaning probably lacking work hard-pressed for happiness is that a fair assessment I do tend to focus in my writing more about in negative scenarios but first of all I don't neglect I sometimes get the opposite comments also I write for example that we are living in the most peaceful era in history and I write things like terrorism is mostly a psychological problem and many more people die from nut allergy than from terrorism we should find the nuts before we are fighting the terrorists like so I do get the opposite like you're optimistic you don't know what's happening in the world but yes generally I do tend to focus on the more negative scenarios and this is for two main reasons first of all because so many other people focus on the positive scenarios especially when you're talking about the technological development of AI in bio engineering and all that so it's very obvious and natural that the people who in the laboratories in the corporation's who are leading these developments they naturally focus on all the enormous benefits and there are enormous benefits that these technologies can bring us so it becomes kind of the job of historians and philosophers and social critics to say wait a minute there are also a few negative scenarios or dangerous scenarios and then the second reason is as I said before in order to try and prevent the most negative so it's like sounding the alarm again if nobody else would have been talking about the positive scenarios then I probably would have been in a position to write a far more balanced story or narrative you know one thing I was reminded of was must be about 20 years ago bill joy wrote the cover story and wired the future may not need us yeah exactly and he was to me that was one of the he was a heretic in a sense that he was in the technology you know world and he said but wait a minute you know and and I think what you're saying is yes bill and we haven't done enough yes yeah we are again it's not a certainty but twenty years later it sounds much much more credible that the future doesn't need most of us yeah you I'll just say that you know it's surprising and a bit said that one of the most common kind of counter arguments because I talk about these issues quite a lot and I may be the most common counter-argument is that we will always be needed as consumers the economy will fall apart if you don't have all these people to buy things and you know you there are all kinds of counter arguments to that as well but before we go into it just you know from from a sheer philosophical perspective the idea that the ultimate destiny of Homo sapiens is to be we are just consumers that's what we are here for you know I'm now reading this book why is there something rather than nothing about the biggest questions of all and no so far I'm not at the end of the book but so far in the book nobody suggested that the ultimate answer is to buy stuff yes on that one I'm reminded of the movie wall-e you know and the the people in their lounge chairs unable to move sort of drinking watching yeah just that I think that algorithms could also be better consumers than the Newman's so we are not even if you accept this scenario yes we are not safe the ultimate yeah yeah the you you you point to as you say you name the dangers and you point to the dangers as a warning isn't it you call attention to it you say that there are three problems three major problems and one of the things that you comment on which I'm sure many in the audience noticed was that these three problems were hardly mentioned in the 2016 presidential election campaign yeah yeah three big big problems of humankind as a whole our nuclear war climate change and technological disruption and the third is of course the most complicated because with the first two we basically know what the aim is to prevent it nuclear war okay we need to prevent it climate change we need to prevent it even the people who deny climate change they don't say there is climate change we don't care about it they said it doesn't it's not real but once you acknowledge it's real then almost everybody reaches the conclusion yes we need to work together to stop it the third problem of technological disruption is much more complicated because we want and we shouldn't just stop all technological progress and also it's not clear when we talk about a logical disruption than AI and bioengineering are the two most important technologies we are talking about and what scares some people sound extremely exciting to other people there are not many people who you talk to them about nuclear war and they say this is so exciting but there are quite a few people that you talk to them about AI becoming more intelligent than humans and they say yes this is very exciting it's not something to be feared it's a think actually that we should accelerate so this is this is a much more complicated problem and these are the three big problems of humankind today they don't receive nearly as much attention in in the political system nothing not just in the US but but everywhere and maybe the most important thing to know about all three problems is that they are global in the very essence and they have absolutely no solution on a national or local basis there is no national solution group to climate change no government however powerful can stop it just by itself or can just build a wall against rising temperatures and rising sea levels and similarly with with with technological disruption even if we agree what kind of developments we don't want to see or which kind of regulations should be in place like we need regulations about doing genetic experiments on human babies so it's kind of easy to ACTU to agree that that this would be a good idea to have some kind of regulation there but it should be obvious to anybody who is concerned about genetic engineering that the only way to effectively regulate this technology is through very deep global cooperation because if just one country or several countries bends a particularly dangerous development but other countries do it then you don't achieve much and also the countries with the band very quickly they will be tempted to break their own ban because nobody wants to stay behind if you know that I know that the Koreans or the Chinese are not producing superhumans about a thousandth you don't want to stay behind so the only way to really do something about all these three problems is through an effective global cooperation and I would ask any politician or any voter who talks in terms of my country first and only my country is important and we should just build a wall and the rest of the of the world can go to hell okay so what's your plan for climate change in nuclear war and technological disruption how is your country by itself going to solve these problems yeah and obviously it's that that the other thing you're saying is that the public the media everyone doesn't pay nearly enough attention doesn't have their eyes on the critical issues and so you can slide by yeah I mean the questions are not raised often enough yeah and in the 2016 election campaign it was hardly talked about by by him by either side and it's the same way when you look for example at the run-up to two bradleys in the UK there was almost no talk about these issues even though Britain is one of the leaders of the world it's a nuke it's one of the over the nuclear powers it's one of the five permanent members of the Security Council and nevertheless the entire discussion was extremely parochial and ignoring the global problems and again it should be obvious to everybody that no matter what you think about the merits of brexit in terms of internal british affairs on a global level it should be obvious Brooks it doesn't help us at all in preventing nuclear war or climate change and breaks it doesn't help us at all in regulating artificial intelligence and biotechnology just the opposite the it's much easier to deal with these issues if you have a strong United European Union then if it breaks up into twenty something in the completely independent countries and of course it should also be said there is no longer such thing as really independent countries it's a complete illusion it's a it's a nostalgic fantasy when you when you see the world of the twenty you could be independent in the 19th century that's true but there is no such thing as independent countries in the 21st century because no country is ecologically independent it depends on what other countries do and similarly no country is completely technological and scientifically independent because science and don't belong to any single country and developments in one country are bound to have a profound impact on all other countries if you think that you can just regulate your AI research and that means you're no longer affected by AI research in China or in Israel or in Russia then you're completely wrong you know it's interesting you're saying these things as obvious completely wrong over you know I mean these are they are over I know I know they are but I think you're making strong assertions that I agree with and yes and yet you said in sapiens that nationalism was on the wane which you know fits with what you would you know that would that be sort of a good sign that we're moving in so what is happening right now that nationalism is on the rise that politicians leaders whole countries seem to be leaning away from as if these things are not obvious well I don't really know what what is happening it's very very complicated one perspective is that the political system has failed and is and about the political system in in almost all countries is no longer able to generate meaningful visions for the future in the 20th century politics was largely a battle between grand visions about the future of humankind some visions were terrible but they will nevertheless visions about the future you had basically three big visions the Communists the fascists and the liberal vision of the future of human coin and politics was a struggle between them what's happening now and for some time is that governments and politicians are doing quite a good job in historical terms in managing the day-to-day affairs of the country again we like to complain but I a medievalist by I like my profession originally I was especially in the Middle Ages so whenever somebody talks about in the education system of the roads of the healthcare there was no healthcare in the Middle Ages nobody even thought that this was part of a job of being a king you know when the Black Death came and a third of the population died the king had nothing to do with it I mean he's the king of him what is he supposed to be able about what is he supposed to do about the Black Death so when it comes to these things the political system is doing quite all right in historical perspective what it is stopped doing is to provide a vision for the future because it is no longer I mean the political system hardly even understands what the question is anymore it hardly understands what are the implications of the new technologies so it's not a big surprise that they can't provide anything for any meaningful vision for where humankind or the country will be in 2015 and into this vacuum enter the nostalgic fantasies about the past it's a bit like you you you go around the city you looking for this place and you drive and at a certain point you realize you lost your way so the first instinct at least of many people is go back to the last place you knew where you were and this is what is happening to humankind now on the collective level we have this very strong and correct sense sense that we no longer know where we are and where we are heading and then a lot of people have this very strong feeling ok let's just go back to the last place we knew where we are and this is and it won't work when you drive around the city it's a good idea but in history you can't go back and whatever nostalgic fantasies you have about this past or that past it's not going to give you the solutions to problems like AI or even like climate change again you see that most of the people who are captivated or who are selling these nostalgic fantasies they just tend to ignore or deny the problems of the 21st century like climate change or like the rise of AI because they know at some level that their fantasies don't contain an answer to these questions yeah when you say that that for that these are not national problems no nation can solve them it takes global cooperation yet it looks like global cooperation is on the wane as well yes do you have some sense of how that's going to turn around I don't know it's well one good piece of information is that we still have far greater cooperation than in almost any previous time in history if you look at something like I don't know I technically which is non-political if you look at the football the world football carbon-copy in Russia a couple of months ago so this is an amazing example of successful human cooperation global cooperation a thousand years ago the idea of bringing people from Argentina France and Japan to play games together in Russia would have been completely you know out of our oven it's Italian nobody even knows in Japan that America exists and there is no game that everybody plays and how do you on the rules and then it's absolutely impossible and even if you look at the political field despite all this rise of nationalism and so forth we are still living in also the most peaceful era in history comparatively I come from the Middle East I know perfectly well there are still Wars in some part of the world but much less than than ever before and if you look at the place like Europe so despite all of the rise of nationalism unlike a century ago Europeans they like to talk about nationalism they don't like to die for it which is a wonderful development that is a great distinction yes they'll even they'll talk about it they'll vote very well they were fight over it but that's it so far I don't know what will happen in two years yes yeah but a century ago in 1918 they were killing each other by the million in the last few years they mostly tend just to talk and vote and if the vote goes against you like the Scottish referendum in in 2014 or something the the Scottish nationalists lost the vote they went to have a point they did not go to raise a Highlander army and let's go down and burn London no it does yeah so I don't know what's relevant what will happen to tomorrow in Catalunya but I hope that they are not going to recreate the Spanish Civil War or the First World War and again about the future we can never be certain we've climbed very very high in terms of getting away from the abyss of human violence but you can fall down very quickly very fast there I mean very far so we should be very careful we shouldn't be complacent about it but so far as of today the world is still characterized by far more cooperation and peacefulness than than ever before so this is one piece of good news the second piece of good news is that there is nothing inherently natural about the kind of nationalism that we are seeing today or we have seen for the last century or two and there is nothing inherently impossible in creating global loyalty or global identity yeah you have a lot of people who say that nationalism is in our genes you know DNA evolution shaped us to be loyal to it to a nation and therefore nationalism is eternal and also a kind of global identities absolutely impossible but this is just nonsense humans are social animals this is absolutely true but evolution has adapted us to being loyal to a small group that is characterized above all by the fact that you know intimately all the other people in your group we are adopted by millions of years of evolution to be loyal to a hundred other people we know intimately and this comes naturally to us nations are much a completely different thing very strange thing they are groups of millions sometimes hundreds of millions of people you never met you will never meet them you don't know them at all and nevertheless you feel loyal to them there is nothing wrong about it it brought a lot of good to humanity this ability to care about strangers to be loyal to strangers but it's a very new development it's based on cultural and not on evolutionary basis it's just you know a couple of centuries or at most a couple of thousand years old and the most important thing we can go beyond it the same mechanisms that enabled Homo sapiens to develop loyalty to a hundred million strangers can also make you loyal to eight billion strangers that's not a little big difference that the leap from a hundred to a hundred million is much greater than the leap from a hundred million to eight billion exactly because when you go from a hundred to a hundred million you go from a hundred you know to a hundred million you don't know and that's a very big leap how to be how to care about somebody I never met and I don't know anything about that person but we have done we've been this leap from a hundred million to eight billion it's much easier because in both cases you are dealing with an abstract group of strangers so yes this is very difficult but we've done it with a hundred million so why not eight billion so that in fact nationalism is a good sign that we can do globalism yeah because you know almost all the nations of today they were found by bringing together people who previously hated each other much more yes then like you know any if you look at Germans so Prussians and Bavarians really rated each other if you look at Britain so despite all the brexit and the Scottish referendum and so forth they are doing quite okay and again as a medievalist I can tell that the Scots and the English once hated each other and killed each other with as much energy and the end exists as the Israelis and the Palestinians today so if you could get Scots and English to form together the single nation of Britain there is hope also on other fronts one thing that that that I was struck by is that you say that one of the things that helped form wait first of all I want to say the number of times you go in a historical perspective I think no no I think that it's very helpful because as few of us have that you know most of our historical perspective is like since high school you know but you say that that that the event that most perhaps formed your worldview of how to view our situation was the fall of the Soviet Union and the actions of Gorbachev yes could you yeah I I I was born in 1976 so at least as a children 13 and 89 yes Wow and but I still remember very vividly the Cold War and like the the fear that that's it the end of the world is coming and the end of the world didn't come instead we had the most peaceful era in history coming and this was this happened not due to any divine intervention God didn't materialize on earth and brought peace no it was humans making some some good decisions some wise decisions and really coming from some of the most unexpected cultures I mean especially you know I Israel was part of the Western bloc and I was raised to think that the Soviets are like these I don't know III one of my favorite songs still today is things Russians I hope the Russians life though children tune which you know it is a sentence it's like like you think they are they're not human even I mean you have to hope that they love their children because all these communist zombies who knows maybe they don't love their children and apparently they do love their children so so you know because the call I mean the greatest credit for the peaceful ending of the Cold War go to the Soviet leadership and to me while Gorbachev nobody was in a position to force them nobody was in a position to invade the Soviet Union and capture Moscow and forced them to dismantle the communist system they reached the conclusion that they needed reform and the reform did not really go the way they intended but when they saw that the system is is collapsing they still had the largest conventional army that the world has ever seen they still had command of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole of humankind several times over and they did not use them they could use them if they gave the order of the word of the Red Army would have obeyed and they didn't use them and and this is far from self-evident if you look at somebody like Assad in Syria or like Gaddafi or like in in 89 like Ceausescu in Romania or Milosevic in Serbia you put a different person in the Kremlin and you would have gotten a very different result so it's far from obvious they they just chose to admit their failure and make a very I think honorable exit from the stage of history so I'm gonna leap from the global to a little bit more personal you you make a very interesting point I found when you said our ability to manipulate often outstrips our ability to understand and he points to nature and says we learned how to manipulate nature we dammed rivers we cut down forests we did all these things before we understood the web of nature and you fear that we are about to do the same thing we're in the process of doing the same thing with human consciousness exactly not just consciousness but the entire internal system the entire internal ecological system inside our bodies inside our brains inside our minds and it's very similar to what happened with the ecosystem outside when we build these dams and drain the swamps and cut down the forest and so forth what guided us above all else were economic and political interests this was the guiding principle about what to do to nature and he is very likely that when we come to start manipulating and re-engineering our bodies and brains and minds we will again be guided above all else by immediate economic and political necessities which is a terrible idea to start reshaping when you know all previous regimes in history however dreadful at least they couldn't really mess up humanity itself no matter how dreadful they were they couldn't really re-engineer the human body and brain they didn't have the power they don't have the power they don't have the knowledge but now we are acquiring these powers and to take us a simple example that in many of these large economic and military and political system you want people to be able to make faster decisions for but compassion on the other hand is far less interesting so one obvious example is that if we if we gain the ability to start tweaking the brain then we are like we are likely to see people who are able to make much faster decisions and process information much faster at the expense of things like compassion or the expense of things like hesitation there is a lot to be said on a human level in favor of uncertainty of hesitation and things like that but in in an army or in a cooperate boardroom hesitation is not very highly valued right not necessarily not valuable just not valued yes yeah I don't be extremely valuable by baking I'm thinking of you know rapid speculation rapid trading hmm that used investment decisions used to be something someone thought about something and now an algorithm does it in milliseconds yeah and even if humans try to get involved so it's more and more likely that the humans will be guided by by algorithms for example okay I want to trade so I have an algorithm that monitors my brain and knows when I'm making stupid decision just by past experience I mean you can tell quite easily when the human brain has entered a stage in which your decisions are unlikely to be very profitable and you had better start stop trading so even if we keep human traders in the loop maybe they are forced by some regulation you have to wear this helmet and the computer is monitoring the state of you the computer can't still maybe make the decisions but the computer can turn when your brain has entered the state in which it makes hasty decision in which your let's say overconfidence overconfidence is one of the worst things when you're making snap decisions about millions of dollars so you as an investment banker who has the responsibility to invest billions of investors dollars you must wear this helmet and you're monitored by a computer and when the computer by monitoring your brain realizes that you have entered the zone of overconfidence you have a red red line stop trading or they just cut the power whatever if they don't do it they may face lawsuits in your--in billion you knew that this person is now overconfident why did you let him continue trading with my money yeah I would like to talk just a little bit about how we deal with this what do you think are the things we most need to cultivate to learn to educate our young and others and so on to cope with some of the situation's we describe some of the the the dangerous situations we are facing also on the collective level we talked a lot about it the the one key ingredient is global cooperation whatever you think we should do about these things it has to be done globally it can't be done or it will be very difficult to do it effectively on the level of one nation if you think about the education system the most important thing to teach people is how is really how to keep a flexible mind and how to keep reinventing themselves throughout their lives because when we don't know which kind of world young people the say somebody who entered school today which kind of world she will inhabit in 2050 we have no idea so the one thing we do know about this youngster is that she will have to reinvent herself couple of times not just once a couple of times during her lifetime so this is the most important skill or resource which should which should get the most attention how do you keep mental flexibility how do you develop your emotional intelligence so that you can cope with this level of change in your life on the personal level I would say maybe the most important thing is you know it's the oldest advice in the book just to get to know yourself better and this advice is more timely now than it was ever before in history because for the first time you have serious competition when Socrates or Buddha told you know yourself to 2500 years ago and you said eh I don't have the time then it wasn't too bad either I mean it was bad but at least at least nobody could do it for a to you the Greek police or whatever could not decipher you could not hack you so if you fail to know yourself you're still a black box to the rest of humanity and to the politicians and so forth and so on now the situation is much more problematic because you have serious competition there are many corporations and governments and organizations that are trying constantly to hack you and if they get to know you better than you know yourself they can manipulate you they can sell you anything they want whether a politician or a product and all the people who say no this can't be because I have free will and I make my decisions freely and nobody could ever decipher me these are the easiest people to manipulate because they when you manipulate them it doesn't even occur to them yes but maybe this desire maybe my amygdala is actually working for Putin no no way it can't be yeah but it kind it can be so if you want to stay in the game you have to get to know yourself before and better than these corporations and governments and organizations and so forth yeah but the algorithms that are manipulating you are racing ahead and many of us are either oblivious or overconfident yeah well overconfidence is very very dangerous in this situation and I think it's a whole new issue which probably we don't have much time to delve into but the whole issue of free will which wanna yes which for thousands of years but just this you know idle philosophical discussion that maybe you believe in it maybe you don't it doesn't have much into much actual implications now it has very profound political and economic implications yeah one of the things that you say is that philosophy history the humanities in a way were always nice to do but they were never as urgently needed at a time when students are opting for I mean at Harvard for instance which was a bastion of humanities and a laggard in science to some extent MIT was you know running rings around it the biggest major is now Engineering and Applied Sciences and that's what people are going into when what you're saying is to know how to use our power do you know how we are being used by our power exactly I think that today to be an engineer for the first time in history you also need to be a philosopher because there are more and more problems in engineering which are actually philosophical problems which have to do a lot with questions like filet will like what is the meaning of life what is the meaning of humanity and things like that and also if let's say that your your your writing code I think it's today extremely irresponsible for any university or college to have to give people a degree in computer science if they didn't take at least a few points in philosophy of coding and in ethics of coding because writing algorithms this is what shapes the world today and you should realize that the algorithms you write they always have an ethical dimension I mean if you write an algorithm that decides who to accept from a job and who not to accept for a job and these are the kinds of algorithms that are now being written then you need a basis in ethics in philosophy otherwise you will just program your own philosophical biases and your own ethical prejudices into the algorithm and we already do they have a lot of very unfortunate examples of algorithms supposed to be you know mathematically objective that when you just look a little into them you realize you have all these racists or a gendered bias built into the algorithm and it's not inevitable but we need to give the coders a basis in ethics and philosophy to prevent it I'm struck by the fact that we over the last 10 years or so began to say MBA is needed to study ethics you know when in fact that's that's sort of old news that's always its coders that if people who study out don't study ethics that's reported but if the people who writing the algorithms haven't studied ethics this is a very very serious problem yeah you know I do a lot of interviews that I very often say oh we could just go on for hours but the number of topics and I will just throw one out that I don't think we have time to talk about which is you know that the Enlightenment the liberal ethic the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence is not adequate yes anymore so I can't just just speak to that and then we'll go to questions yeah and liberal democracy has been the best system that humans have developed so far in history how to how to build a society how to run a society but we shouldn't be complacent it should be obvious that like any other system that humans built it is adapted to particular technological and economic conditions it would have been impossible to have an american-style liberal democracy in the Middle Ages you just didn't have the technological and economic basis for that and similarly when we look ahead to the future to the 21st century democracy as we have known it over the last few decades will have to change maybe quite radically in order to survive it's still the best system I think especially because it's the most it's more flexible system right but it will have to change and in a world in which again to take that may be the most important factor the rise of algorithms that know people better than that people know themselves this is the key issue now you our entire system so far whether you think about democratic elections or whether you think about the free market it is based on the assumption that nobody knows me better than I know myself this is why the voter and the customer are the highest authority in the political system and in the economic system the voter knows best the customer is always right once you have algorithms that know people better than they know myself it collapses because not just you couldn't predict so you don't need to ask the customer you can send the product ahead but of course if as everybody knows there is a very very show from prediction to manipulation if you understand the system well enough to predict it you are usually also in a position to manipulate it and of course humans were always manipulate yeah it's always been we always knew the voter could be fooled the customer politically boost but it we are reaching a point when there is a difference in in magnitude in the kind of manipulations you can you can have and if we just leave the system as it is it will become an emotional puppet show once we need to realize that humans are now hackable animals you can hack them and if you just leave the basically 18th century system or 19th century system that we've inherited without major changes the result will be an emotional puppet show okay Ted where are you there we are time for a few questions you've all gentleman asks Bill Gates has picked two of your books as his summer read recommended books his review in the New York Times recently of this new book had some criticism could you please respond to that I think criticism is a good thing this is how science progresses by having disagreements and and by having debates I think the most important aim of my new book is to focus the conversation on certain questions is to change the global conversation let's talk more about AR and climate change and less about things like nationalism and like immigration and as long as people are agreeing on the questions I'm very happy to have disagreements about about the predictions and about the answers and I think it's very important to have these disagreements because you the debate is hardly began there is hardly yet a serious public debate about for example artificial intelligence and big data so it would be very strange and probably counterproductive if the debate starts by people saying ok everybody agrees on the same thing the end of the debate so this is what I think we need to do and and in this sense I was very happy with with the gates with Bill Gates's review that great let's have this debate let's have this disagreement next question a gentleman says if you were asked and he says this is obviously hypothetical by members of Congress to help question Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in the last month what sort of questions would you ask them uh what sort of questions I would ask about the endgame about where all this is going to now I know that a certain Lincoln congressional hearing you're not going to get really honest or complete answers but as a scholar as a historian this is what I would most want to know what is their vision for for Humanity in terms of decades 50 years 60 years a hundred years where do they think all this is taking us this is the most important question that I would like to get an answer to on a more immediate level I would have questions about the basic business model and especially about all everything that has to do with capturing people's attention capturing people's attention and then using it or abusing it in in all kinds of ways like selling it to advertisers or selling it to anyone who want one wants to buy it and I think that human attention is there's always been an extremely important resource and now because of the intense competition it becomes maybe one of the most important resource and how to defend human attention from being abused now you have and this goes back to the question about the current system in the free market and democracy in the standard answer is humans have free will the customer is always right if the customer wants to play candy crush five hours a day customer is always right but candy crush and the things like it were designed to hack our brain I think that these kinds of answers the customer is always right they have free will nobody would play Big Brother and tell them what to do and so forth this is no longer an acceptable answer in the 21st century again this is one of the prices to pay for the naive belief in free will that gives this gives an open check to abuse people attention to their to abuse the attention of people and then the reply is always okay people chose it they have free will could you please describe your spiritual practice does your practice help see I stayed away from that does your spiritual practice help you deal with or accept the current state of the world and lastly do you believe spirituality taps into an objective truth or is it just a personal deception that allows the individual to feel a false sense of calm and connection okay so maybe I'll start by a definition of spirituality I distinguish between spirituality and religion spirituality is about questions and religion is about answers spirituality is when you have some big question like Who am I or what what is reality or what is the good and you are willing to follow this question wherever it takes you even if it takes you into conflict with all kinds of established traditions and authorities and so forth this is the spiritual quest religion in many cases is exactly the opposite is coming with an answer with a story this is the answer and if you dare to doubt it then you will burn in hell or we will burn you and in this sense they are opposites for me the big spiritual question that I follow is what is reality what is really happening and I don't want to go too much into my my practice not just because it's private but mainly because it's one of these things that it doesn't do a lot of good to talk about them too much but my I practice be personal meditation I do two hours every day when I get the opportunity I go every year for a long retreat of between 30 and 60 days and the one question that guides that the practice is what is really happening right now what is reality and it starts with and you think okay what is reality you think about the global system and about the election in the US and about the capitalist system no you need to start with with the simplest things so it starts with just just observing the breath coming in and out of your nostrils when I went to my first meditation cause that the teacher Goenka just gave this instruction you bring all your attention to the breath and when the breath goes into your nostrils you just know oh now it goes into the nostrils and when it goes out you just know now it goes out this that's it it's not you don't even need to control the breath you these are the breathing exercises you just try to see reality as it is and it sounded like the like you know the simplest most ridiculous thing in the world what can I learn by that and the amazing thing for me was I was doing my PhD at Oxford at this at a time and so I thought it was a very clever person and I couldn't do it for more than ten seconds without my mind running away somewhere like I would try to just okay no is it coming in or out and I would my mind would run away to some memories and fantasy some some whatever and I realized I have absolutely no control of my mind I know almost nothing about my mind and between me in the world the mind constantly generates all these stories and fictions and fantasies and whatever and they constantly come between me in the world not just between me and the capitalist system they come between me and my breath if I can't observe my breath for more than 10 seconds just as it is what hope do I have of observing correctly the intricacies of Wall Street or whatever so this was one of them that the first big realization that I had and in a way my spiritual quest started from that can I give him a last question why don't you take the last question I'll give you a last question because it's one thing we left out okay you began to touch on it in the meditation when you're talking about meditation you say that one of the most important things in your life in your work for all of us is to separate reality from fiction leave us with a few words on that one well it's very difficult for humans to do it because we conquered the world through telling fictional stories so it's really kind of a matter of survival for us not to be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality but for a moral perspective and this may be a kind of answer it's actually important to be able to separate what is a fiction invented by humans and what is the reality now fictions are extremely important we can't organize any large-scale cooperation without fictions without things that we invent and exist only in the stories we tell and if earlier a I gave the example of the world football Cup so you can't play football unless you get 22 people at least 22 people to agree on the same fictional set of rules that we invented and it's fun to play football it's fun to watch football it's it is good it's there but when some people lose miss the difference between fiction and reality they might start beating and killing people because their team lost the game or something like that and that's that's a bad idea and they should remember all okay it's just a game and it's true also things like gods and religion and money and nations and corporations we invented them they are there to serve us we invented nations and money and corporations and all that in order to organize ourselves and in order to improve life for ourselves if we discover that we are starting to sacrifice people for these imaginary entities something went wrong somewhere and so it's very important to be able to tell the difference between a real entity and a fictional entity now the best and simplest test is the test of suffering if you want to know whether the hero of some story that people tell you about life is real or fictional you should just ask can it suffer now a nation cannot suffer even if it loses a war and you say the nation suffered a huge defeat this is just a metaphor didn't really suffer he doesn't have in mind it doesn't have consciousness it can't feel pain or sadness or depression nothing Germany wasn't depressed after the First World War some Germans many Germans were but not Germany doesn't have a mind it can't be depressed and similarly a cooperation can't feel anything it can't experience suffering and a currency can't experience anything humans on the other hand and also are the animals they are real entities they can suffer so very counterintuitive but a chicken can suffer far more for than the United States or then Google because a chicken has a mind and it can experience pain and pleasure and all kinds of other sensations and emotions and it would be good for for everybody when you can't do it all the time but to keep returning to this very simple basic test to know what is the difference between reality and fiction simply the question can it suffer thank you [Applause]

Channel: LiveTalksLA

Views: 130,224

Rating: 4.7735386 out of 5

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, Homo Deus, Live Talks Los Angeles, Live Talks LA, Random House, Penguin Random House

Id: q-KG9POMV7I

Length: 77min 45sec (4665 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 14 2018