Yuval Noah Harari & Natalie Portman

[Applause] thank you thank you um i'm so honored to be here talking to you and thank you for pouring me water gentlemanly um so we talked about how the most sort of obvious connection between us maybe for other people would be that we both were born in israel so i'm interested in how you think your origins have influenced you as a historian as a thinker um i think we're both born in the myth factory of the world like a place that specializes in producing extremely powerful stories for good and for bad and when you live in such a place you just cannot ignore the enormous power of the human imagination the enormous power of stories to move the world so i guess that you know maybe i would have written the same books even if i had been born in australia or china maybe not but certainly i think that living in a place where at least recently people have been killing each other by the millions over fictional stories makes you see the world in a very particular way no abs absolutely um and that aspect of fiction has so much to do with what you talk about and of course what what i do in in filmmaking um telling stories and i'm interested what you think the role of fiction is in in history and historical in the way you put things together too um well yeah now certainly hollywood is competing with the holy land for the title of the main story factory of the world and is almost as powerful and yeah i mean it's really my my perception is that in the end the economists and the engineers and the soldiers they are very often just working to realize something that came up in the mind of some poet and this is also why there is so i think there is a huge responsibility uh on the shoulders of poets and screenwriters and and actors and artists that you know you think that oh we just entertain people but this is not the case it goes much much more deeply it provides the kind of scaffolding for people to make sense of their individual lives and of their collective lives and good stories create a very good world and problematic stories create a very problematic world and the human ability to create fictions on the one hand is responsible for all our amazing achievements as a species but also to so much harm that we have done to ourselves and that we have done to to other animals uh that as far as we know i would say one of the main differences as far as we know between us and the other animals that they can't create these kinds of fictions but their lives and death is often determined by the stories that uh this particular ape species is able to to tell and believe can you talk more about how you think that that storytelling has made us survive or how that has helped humans to thrive um like how has it been a survival tool storytelling it simply enables cooperation i mean the key issue is how do you get complete strangers to trust one another trust one another enough in order to cooperate and to cooperate can mean to build a prison or to build an army or to build a hospital to build a school in all cases you're dealing with lots of strangers cooperating towards a common goal and the trust is again in the end trust is always based on on believing in the same story so thousands of years ago two strangers meet in the jungle and they want to trade instead of fight so they don't know each other so how do you trust somebody you don't know you realize that you're actually family uh you have some mythical ancestor that hey he's your ancestor is also my ancestor so we are actually both we are both descendants of abraham we have the same ancestor oh so we actually are actually brother and sister and once you get over that hurdle we are not even strangers i mean in reality we are strangers we don't know anything about each other but in our imagination we are brothers and sisters we we are descended we belong to the same family and then we can trust and if this sounds very very primitive then you just need to take out the currency notes of most countries today in the world and you will see the same thing the same ancestors like if you in the united states so you go to a supermarket and you meet a stranger you know you don't know this person and you want to buy bread or bananas or whatever and you take out this piece of paper right you see this ancestor george washington this you know we are the same and because we both believe in the same story we can trust each other and it works and um it works when the story comes from the holy land about jesus and god and whatever and it can work when the story comes from hollywood uh and you know it's not a coincidence that now that i travel a lot around the world and when you meet somebody very often we try to look for a tv series that we both watched hey you also i also watched it so suddenly we kind of like you know we have some common story together and it breaks the eyes and what's the story what's the difference between a story that people believe in and a story that people um just just watch and know is fictional but relate to in some way like a tv show in terms of like a connecting tissue there is no clear line i mean the whole thing works by uh by being a bit opaque by being a bit cloudy and misty and unclear um when we think about it kind of retroactively or philosophically we think that the world is divided quite clearly into okay there is fiction and then it's reality but usually they just get mixed together and when you would when you watch a movie so for 90 minutes you have if the movie is good you forget it's just a fictional story if you constantly remember hey it's just a fictional story it's just actors they rehearsed this scene 50 times and shot it again and again and again and then stitched it together and ah then it's not a good movie right you are not really getting caught up in the story and it's the same with something like football to really enjoy it you need to forget for again at least 90 minutes that you know this is just fictional rules that we said that the most important thing is to get the ball into into the goal who said if you think like that you won't enjoy football so you need to you know the suspension of this belief it's like the first thing that they'll teach in almost any art school or any school about literature suspension of disbelief yeah it's always mysterious to me in literature that when there's a fictional book that seems too autobiographical everyone says oh it's just she's writing about herself it's not really fiction and then when there's um a story that's non-fiction but it doesn't totally adhere to facts people say oh they're straying from it and it's like of course everything is some version of fiction yeah i mean i remember i think it was in the uk a couple of years ago there was this huge outcry that they wanted to stage something from harry potter like the harry potter theater show or something and they wanted to have a black person playing hermione okay and there was this huge awkward no you can't do that hermione is white and people went over i think the entire seven volumes it's seven right i think the entire seven volumes and they found one place just one place where the text indicates clearly that it's something about hermione hiding in the woods on a moonlit night and the moon rays fall upon her white skin something like that they found the one place in the entire seven volumes that and no you have to stick with reality you don't mind people flying on broomsticks you don't mind you know all these things but no no no no she has to be white yeah i love you read in the book about um how certain religions tend toward choosing specific facts from their texts uh you know that if you look in old jewish texts for example you can find very erotic passages in you know uh even uh images in in synagogues and yet current religious judaism is all about female modesty why do you think that so many religions uh so many people within different religions tend toward the conservative facts as opposed to the evidence that they can find in the past that is more loose or open sexually morally whatever it's a kind of arms race that everybody wants to be like more orthodox and more pious than the other and there is this tendency to think that the more strict i am the closer i am to god somehow but he's very strict um so you see along the centuries that they they you draw a line and then you you draw a line just just behind it just to be on the safe side so nobody crosses this line will draw another line just on on and it gets you know like with as you said like in the ancient in in ancient synagogues that were excavated by archaeologists you often find images of women on the floors in mosaics and on on the walls i mean today in at least in orthodox synagogues in israel it would be blasphemous and sacrilege to have uh any i mean in many religious neighborhoods you can't even have when you have uh advertisements it's only men and boys like there was a famous skate that they they made advertisement for a new uh a new neighborhood or something so you know you have these new houses and happy families and the happy families it was just men and boys because you can't show not only in synagogue you can't show and and there is when you go back you know 2 000 years to the rabbis who wrote the mishnah and the talmud they prayed in synagogues with images of women on the floor and on the walls um so yes you have this escalating arms race and you talk also about you write about um the the use of metaphor in religion compared to meditative practice where you talk about breath is breath as opposed to in religion you know the wafer is christ's body or the salt water and passover for jews is the tears of slaves where there's so much metaphor um why do you feel that the the sort of literalism appreciating the thing for the thing it is is more helpful for you in meditation than it's kind of comparison and religion well in the meditation practice at least the meditation i practice is really about just being able to observe reality as it is to really tell the difference what is real and what is just stories and fictions and metaphors generated by my mind or by somebody else's mind but you know people sometimes pass their entire lives just within metaphors and fictions and never getting a real glimpse of of reality and also i think living aside the meditation practice as a historian i kind of developed a horror of metaphors because what often happens to metaphors in history they get solidified and rarified and and become a thing itself and people forget where where they came from to give an example like you know in religion so people talk about salvation and redemption and eternity but what is eternity what is salvation it's too difficult for most people to grasp and certainly to attain so you have a metaphor you have say a building a temple a mosque the wailing wall the western wall which stands as a metaphor for eternity as a metaphor for salvation and people would go to the temple and okay so you have a place standing in for this abstract very difficult to grasp notion of of eternity or for salvation but what happens next people forget it's just a metaphor they refy the metaphor the temple really is salvation the temple really is eternity and then what do you want to do you want to possess eternity suddenly you can i if i can just get hold or conquer this pile of stones i have eternity i have salvation and then people start fighting over these things forgetting that yeah this was just a metaphor don't take it so serious and it happened thousands of years ago it happens today that you know the the essence of holy places like temples or synagogues or like the place we are here right now is in the end it's about the human experience it's the idea that you go to a place and you experience peace like you have a lot of anger in your life you have a lot of irritation in your life or hate or whatever and there is a place that you can go and experience peace and feel better about yourself and also be better to other people and this is like you know the the the essential idea of a temple or a mosque or a synagogue but then what happens is that some of these places become factories of hatred instead of going there and experiencing peace people start fighting over these places you know which is very strange because you know this is a dysfunctional temple right like you have a car factory that doesn't produce cars you don't want it so you have a peace factory which for some reason produces wars you don't want this factory it's broken um there's there's a thing in psychology that you probably have heard about where um where um people who are depressed are more realistic like if you tell them a story they will recount it more accurately and people who are not depressed tend to change the story to make it more optimistic make things better so there's kind of this thing about how like being unrealistic actually is a is a way to make yourself happier um do you find that taking reality as reality what you're talking about seeing stones as stones and breath as breath is a bleaker vision of the world um it takes out some of the color yes it but it brings back i think more than it takes away because in the end you know the the the the greatest mysteries in the world we experience them every day consciousness is probably the greatest mystery in the universe and it's not you know some special experience of place or whatever um just to understand pain to understand irritation to understand the experience of of of boredom if we could really understand that this is the most interesting and the most amazing thing we know about in the entire universe is this really miracle of consciousness and um so i don't think i'm i'm really giving up on on the big things of of the world of the universe um it's yeah i mean there is a tendency of the big things to be eventually very banal that um i don't know i was a specialist in the crusades this was like my first when i began my career as a historian my special field was crusades crusader history and i kept reading these chronicles about the first crusade uh you know in 1096 the the the all these knights in shining armor leaving europe to go to the holy land and conquer jerusalem and they had these millionaires expectations that when we will get to jerusalem the most amazing thing in the world will happen like the end of time the second coming of whatever and eventually it was just sober now like they fought and they and they killed and they died for four terrible years and endured terrible hunger and sieges and battles and eventually conquered jerusalem and slaughtered all its population and the the holy places and you know it was just like any other day they woke up next day they ate breakfast they fought with one another somebody had stomachache it was just so banal the um the the use of fiction back to that in in in telling history and being a historian is i'm i i wonder if you ever intentionally use it to make points more clear like for example someone told me with i studied psychology in school so excuse me if many of my examples are from psychology but oliver sacks the sort of popular psychologist some of his case studies one of my professors told me are not realistic like there's one example of someone who has a disorder or that they can't they kind of recognize things from their shape and they mistake a fire hydrant for a child and they said that would never happen because you could still see the shape move and if something's not moving they would know it's not a child it's completely unrealistic and they approached sax about it and he said of course but you give an example that's so clear that people remember it and it stays more clearly in their minds and so for medical students it's a much better example even if it's not really factually accurate because they'll remember that when they're diagnosing someone they'll be like oh the fire hydrant now is there any equivalent in what you do where you shape something that might have a little fiction that you acknowledge but it's a clearer way to round your your point there is always the temptation because it works very well um to a certain extent yes i do it all the time all historians do it all the time because we use stories and reality just not built like a story when if you just try to tell reality as it is then you end up i don't know james joyce writing ulysses like the stream of consciousness and the million things happening and nobody can almost nobody can can finish the book or remember what is happening uh it's just our fortune and misfortune as a species that we think in stories so if you want to make a point you have to take the to take the messiness of reality and cast it as as a story otherwise people don't understand and we have now all these you know discussions about for example climate change that how to make the general public understand what is happening what is the enormity of the crisis we are facing what is the evidence supporting it what should we do and the problem is that scientists including climate scientists they think in facts in numbers in statistics in equations in graphs all the things that make most people like fall asleep or just not get it if you really want to make the public understand climate change you need a story so from this perspective it's almost inevitable and um even again you don't i mean there is there is a step further which i try to avoid as much as possible which in order to make the story a little better let's invent some of the facts let's change some of the facts because it serves a good cause and it will be a better story a more memorable story and this is a constant temptation uh that i i can't you know promise that i never sin but i try not to right if the story is complicated so okay so it will be a bit more complicated well one of the things that has most impacted me from your writing was um an article that you wrote for the guardian that is also a chapter in 21 questions um uh about the theater of terrorism and i bring it up in every time's up meeting that i go to um because i've i was really surprised and completely shifted my my perspective to see how how how you showed that the spectacle of 911 was the twin towers coming down and not the pentagon which was the more classical military you know target that was hit that day but the spectacle this visual this image was so powerful across the world and then using something like that for positive so for something like climate change like how can we use that concept of spectacle and how how impactful it is in today's day and age in a positive way as opposed to obviously a destructive way yes so you know you have the polar bear on this iceberg which is the iconic image of of climate change and it's it's a very powerful image now of course climate change is not about polar bears i mean it's also about them but it's not the only thing and still this is the iconic image because again this goes from the birds to the apes this is how the apes see the world so you must speak their language if you just give them a list of statistical facts you lose them um and you know the big advantage of terrorists in the struggle for attention and attention is now maybe the most important resource in the world and you have all these a lot a lot of the political struggles today in the world there are actually struggles for attention and again unfortunately because of our evolutionary background there is nothing that grabs attention more than violence so staging a spectacle of violence captures the attention of people of the media more than anything else and this is the like the simple insight which underlies the whole phenomena of the phenomenon of terrorism and they understood it and and they use it they create a spectacle of violence they kill a handful of people and make millions fear for their lives it's extremely effective it's it's kind of you know it hijacks our brains it hijacks our own evolutionary mechanisms how do you think that's different from state violence state violence is very often on a very large scale you actually sometimes kill millions of people it's not about the fear is a byproduct but it's not the main thing actually very often it's the opposite when states use tremendous amounts of violence in many cases they try to hide it no no nothing is happening don't look here don't look here we don't want reporters we don't know journalists terrorists is just the opportunity there usually terrorism is is the strategy of very weak parties they can't use violence on the largest they would like to but they just can't so they have just this spectacle of violence and then they try to call in yes come everybody come see all the journalists all the reporters tv tv cameras wonderful come here we have a spectacle of violence and we want to be in every uh tv set around the country um so it works very differently the states are really powerful very often they're really powerful they don't want to draw attention to their power and and you you write about how and we've talked a little bit about how the women's movement has achieved this change rather recently without much violence and how unusual that is what do you think why do you think that happened so late why do you think i mean obviously there's still far very far to go um but but why do you think that happened so late and why do you think it was successful without violence well first we really need to to you know to stop a minute and think about the really the amazing change that the feminist revolution has done over the last century and with so little violence you know you have much much smaller changes in human society over the over in during history which required tremendous amount of violence and this you know for thousands of years all over the world different religions cultures political systems and one thing is constant which is the subjugation and operation of women it's the patriarchal system to the degree that many people thought that this is just natural and eternal it's just the way things are nothing can change it and then within a relatively short time historically speaking of a century or two and with very very little violence a tremendous change has happened and we don't really understand uh how to account for it partly because we also as scientists as scholars as historians we find it difficult to explain the patriarchal system in the first place many people think that there are obvious answers to the question why in almost all large-scale human societies women had a much lower legal and political and economic status than men and actually we don't have a good theory oh i have one i don't know if it's good well it seems like it balances out the biological uh superiority can i say that not superiority but the fact that we're like the center of creation you're the means of reproduction so to to to to control the means of reproduction you have to have some sort of balance on that right you know it's it may be quite obvious why men would like to control women's bodies women's sexuality what is not clear is how how are they able to do it because we have other species including some of our closest relatives in nature the bonobo chimpanzees in which yeah maybe the bonobo males would like to control the female bonobos but they just can't in in bonobo society uh networks of females actually dominate the society now lots of people have this very simplistic notion that men are simply stronger physically so you know it's no brainer but actually this is a very problematic theory because when you look at human societies there is no consistent uh match between physical strength and social and political power in many cases uh there is a huge mismatch there like in most societies people in their 50s and 60s and 70s dominate people in their 20s even though people in their 20s are physically stronger if you look at organizations whether it's the catholic church whether it's the united states whether it's the mafia so very often the the pope is not the strongest catholic around you know it's not like they had this big boxing championship of all the catholic males in the world and francis you know defeated all the competition so he's now pope and even in criminal organizations very often the you know the the the couple the tutee copy the the big boss he could be in many 60s who doesn't go around beating people up but he has the power to tell much younger and stronger men go and kill this guy and they obey and usually social power depends on social abilities the ability to build alliances the abilities to reach compromises with potential allies the ability to understand what the other person is thinking either in order to reach a deal or in order to be aware of a trap and at least according to folk psychology i'm we'll be happy to hear what you think about it but psychology usually argues that women are better than men in all these things like understanding the viewpoint of somebody else instead of obsessing about what i think and what i want so if if if this is true and i'm not sure if it's true but if it is true that women have superior social skills or at least some social skills it's a very big riddle then why is it that human society is dominated by these self-centered males and not by women with their superior abilities to make alliances and which compromises and and so forth because again if you look at bonobo society male bonobos are significantly stronger than female bonobos but the males don't don't have strong networks whereas the females have very strong networks and this is what enables them to dominate the society and so no one has come up with any plausible you know there is an entire industry of theories about the origins of the patriarchal system and why it has been so robust and and uh and long-lasting and why is it shaking in in the last few decades there is no shortage of theories but there we are very far from having um an evidence-based theory which is accepted by the majority of of scholars that's um that's i want to talk more about that later um um you you you have a really fascinating part of um the book that talks about how fake news has kind of always existed and i'm i'm interested in how you think the sort of biblical fake news that you've sort of touched upon um is different than today's you know kind of intentional misinformation campaigns well misinformation and propaganda have been there throughout history the means are different again religion is an obvious place to go and even religious people will agree that all religions except one are fake news my religion is of course the truth you know you go you go ask a jew then the jew will tell you yes judaism is the truth but christianity you know all these stories about jesus being the son of god and rising from the dead this is all fake news don't believe that then you go to the christian priest he will tell you no no no this is this is honest to god truth but all these stories of the muslims about muhammad being visited by the archangel gabriel and the quran being dictated by god and all that this is all fake news and you ask the muslim he will say the same thing about hinduism and so forth and you don't really need the modern means of communication to spread fake news uh people you know they blame facebook and social media and all that but if you live in some small medieval village a thousand years ago so you don't have facebook you don't have a smartphone but somebody comes along and tells you hey do you know the old woman who lives by the forest i just saw her flying on a broomstick and within an hour you would have an entire mob of people with torches and pitchforks ready to burn this woman to death so this is you know fake news medieval style right and so the means of spreading and creating the fake news change but the phenomena has been there throughout throughout human history right the the the the part of the book where you talk about ai and and basically our our our technology kind of knowing how to manipulate us so that they can affect so that our technology can affect our decision making so that we're almost automatons like being it was very scary to me um and i was interested because you had talked about how this has been a phenomenon forever how why this is actually scarier than someone coming to your village like why is this different if we've always been manipulated and we've always thought our own decisions were our own decisions but were actually influenced by a lot of people manipulating us and telling us stories why is this different because up till now the manipulation was rather rudimentary nobody could really know what was happening inside your brain so you know they had four psychology and folk sociology for for thousands of years you know which kind of stories make people do what kind of things but it's very rudimentary and unscientific and this was simply because nobody could really get inside your brain and inside your mind because nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power you know to gather all the data about you 24 hours a day and analyze it i mean even if you lived in the soviet union during stalin or or during brezhnev era and you had the kgb follow you around 24 hours a day the kgb didn't have the kind of brain science we have today and the kgb did not have like supercomputers so you know you have all this huge file on natalie that we gathered for years but who can read all that and analyze it now it's a completely different situation we are beginning to have enough understanding of biology and enough computing power so that for the first time in history somebody some corporations some governments could be in a position to hack human beings in a systematic and loud scale manner which means that very soon somebody out there will know me better than i know myself and will know you better than you know yourself now again it's not completely new there were cases before that somebody knows you better than you know yourself very often we call this person mother when i was you know three years old or five years old my mother knew me better than i knew myself understood my quirks and my personality and what's good for me and what's not good for me and the good thing is that in most cases if you don't grow up in a very abusive family then your mother has your best interests so it's good that she knows you better than you know yourself because as a three-year-old you won't survive otherwise you're not angry you're hungry [Laughter] for my kids but the problem is what happens if you're 30 years old and the president tells you you're not angry you're hungry that's that's far more sinister than when it comes from your mother or when amazon tells you you're not really angry about me you're just hungry you need to eat this trust me by this yeah yeah and this is what we are going to and it's not you know it's science fiction fantasy um actually i think that science fiction is not drilling deep enough about this point there are some movies and novels that would deal with it but i think personally that science fiction is maybe the most important genre today because it prepares people for dealing with the new challenges of the 21st century like like ai but it usually focuses on the wrong scenarios like the scenario of the ai gaining consciousness and the robots coming to kill us this is very unlikely i'm far more concerned about the robots coming to feed us and and and to sell us stuff that the robots are coming to sell us stuff they've already come together and they know how to press our emotional buttons so they're very good at selling us us stuff so do we throw away our smartphones is that the no i mean does that help us does it save us no i mean it's impossible and also because you know much of the new technology has wonderful promises we don't want to give up all the good things that the internet and smartphones have been doing for us um i met my husband on the internet so i don't want to give it up the internet has been good to me but like with every technology we need to make it serve our purposes instead of us serving its purposes the problem is that for the first time we have a technology that can understand our purposes better than we do and can therefore manipulate it without our even realizing it we have all this still myth of free will that everything we choose is of our own free will and this is a myth that served us well for a couple of centuries but now it's becoming dangerous because when people believe that every decision they make reflects why did you choose this oh this is my free will then you're very i'm curious about what's really happening inside your brain inside your mind and what kind of buttons and levers are are being pressed and you know as long as nobody can really mess with your brain in your mind then you can believe in free will and there is no harm but once somebody has privileged access to your inner reality and it's not you it's some corporation or government then belief in free will becomes very very dangerous the easiest people to manipulate are the people who are convinced that their decision i i decided it's my free will okay but if you don't if you don't believe in free will then how can you even believe that you have the choice to be free of it of of this manipulation no we have choices all the time we have a will we have desires we have choices we just don't choose which desires to have our choices in this sense they are not free they are the result of an enormous amount of influences genetic environmental and increasingly technological so you know a lot of people think that if i don't believe in free will then i will just curl up in some corner and and starve to death because you know but actually i find this extremely liberating that you know the next thought that pops up in the mind the next desire that pops up in the mind instead of rushing to identify with it ah this is me i chose it you actually become more curious hey where did this come from is it really my desire or was it planted or influenced by something sounds like schizophrenia to be like this is not my idea that someone implanted it in my brain like the government put a radio in my brain right yes but you know what was schizophrenia 50 years ago is becoming reality and you know it's becoming great i need something stronger than water i need like a i need a whiskey or something so you know nobody knows how to deal with it i mean i don't know how to deal with it i just know that we have to you know face this reality as when as we enter an era in which we are no longer black boxes in which it is becoming easier and easier for all kinds of entities again could be corporations could be governments could be various organizations to constantly monitor us and thereby hack us not our smartphones not our bank accounts hack our brains our personality they can know which you know you have today it's not science fiction you have today corporations whose advertisement campaigns are like new precision guided munitions like we need to find um 16 year old uh girls with low self-esteem this is the ideal clientele for our product and we now have an algorithm that can sift through big data gathered from youtube and facebook and whatever and we can locate the 16 728 16 year old girls with low self-esteem that we can target for our product and this is not science fiction this is happening all the time you know cambridge analytica and all that it drew attention to the uh political implications of this technology and personally i think it's actually good it happened because it was a kind of wake-up call and we still have time not a lot of time but we still have some time to do something about it to realize what is the implications of creating these kinds of of technologies to hack human beings and you talk about global governing bodies kind of approaching these issues and also corporations these tech companies having sort of philosophers on staff ethicists to deal with you know the ethics of a self-driving car and and things like that what how how would you design that sort of committee or what would be your recommendations for for these tech companies in designing their technology to be responsible if they want to be responsible which i would hope many of them do well it needs to come in from various directions we definitely need uh government and international regulations about these things and many of the greatest dangers they can't be regulated on the level of a single nation of a single country you need international agreements on on the regulation of the most dangerous technologies otherwise it wouldn't work because nobody would like to stay behind in an ai arms race there is a lot of things that corporations can do that engineers and technicians and scientists can do it's just you know which projects you choose to work on at present a lot of these big data surveillance algorithms they survey individuals in the service of corporations and governments this is huge the usual direction but there is nothing about technology that prevents us from designing the opposite type of of surveillance mechanisms for example a big data ai algorithm that surveys the government in the service of the citizens to make sure there is no corruption you like surveillance so much why don't we survey you yes no no no no no no you're here this is a red line this this no and and similarly you know you have all these big tech companies designing creating engineering ai to monitor and survey us you can design an ai sidekick that yes it gets to know me even better than i know myself it gets to know my unique weaknesses but in order to protect me from the hostile ais out there that are trying to get me there is no technical reason why you can't go in that direction and just as you have an antivirus for your computer that at least tries to defend your computer from all these malware and trojan horses and and so forth we can have an ai that protects me from all these other ais that are trying to hack me and to manipulate me it's just a question of what we choose to do with the new technologies but you you you also wrote the thing that i really connected to about how we're very good at creating technologies and not very good at predicting how it will be used um i'm paraphrasing poorly um you can probably elaborate more on it but um i'm just wondering if we accept that that you know we can create fertilizer that we think is gonna be a great thing and feed all these people and then becomes the biggest environmental disaster we think we're doing something good that will save people that will help people um and and ends up being a crisis or you know twitter the founders of twitter recently expressed regret over they thought bringing news to everybody quickly would help save the world and obviously it's become very very negative in many ways although positive in other ways too if how how do we create things when so many good intentioned things have such negative impacts that we can't predict there is no easy solution to that it's just it's a question of you know of simplicity and complexity that it's far simpler to manipulate things than to understand them we sometimes naively think that to really manipulate something you need to understand all its complexity but it's it's totally not the case um you it's much easier for example to build a dam over a river than to understand the complexity of the ecosystem and all the different uh implications of building this dam or like the example that you gave with the fertilizer that yes plants need more nitrogen in order to grow wonderful we have this chemical that provides nitrogen to the plants but this it was easy for chemists not not very easy but relatively easy for chemists to synthesize this particular fertilizer but to understand what are the implications when large quantities of this chemical are being washed into the ocean year after year and what it will do to the fish and to the octopuses and to the algae and so forth this is so much more complicated and it's it's it's the same with twitter and it's the same is almost every technology there is this huge gap between manipulation and understanding and i think the worst danger in on this front is that we are about to gain the ability to manipulate the human body in the human brain in the human mind long before we understand the full complexity especially of the human mind so we are likely to start changing manipulating our internal reality without really understanding the full consequences which could lead to just as we now face an ecological disaster in the outside world we might face a kind of mental eco disaster in the world inside us and you know we are now conducting beginning to conduct these huge experiments on billions of people and billions of kids nobody knows what are the consequences for example of uh raising kids on on screens we just don't know we hope it will be okay we hope we will meddle through and so far you know so far so good but we just really don't know something that you you write about as being one of the sort of central tenets of your secularism is eliminating suffering um and then you also write very you quote extensively and impactfully from brave new world about how the soma the the drug kind of takes out everything that's like worthwhile in life you know the this feeling this lack of pain and takes away so much art and um so much of what makes life life um and obviously there's such an equivalent with the opioid epidemic now and um how obviously there's a goal of eliminating pain but obviously it's it's also creating like a zombie nation for for us in in the us um what how do you reconcile that sort of tenet of of trying to alleviate human suffering and and of course other sentient beings suffering animal suffering um with the necessity i mean i believe in the necessity of having a a spectrum that you know you can't experience the love without the the possibility of that love of breaking up you can't experience the joy of living without the threat of mortality um in my in my mind um i mean maybe that's an opinion as opposed to a truth um but but i i'm interested in how you reconcile those those um the huge difference between pain and suffering very often suffering is i mean pain is a particular sensation in the body suffering is generated by the mind very often in reaction to things like pain the pain is pain okay i have pain in my knee the suffering is when my mind starts going crazy i want to get rid of this pain and it's still there and i want to get rid of it and and this i want to get rid of it there is something in reality and i don't want it to be in reality but it's there this is the generation of suffering so it's something very different from pain if we just learn how to live with the pain it's still painful but at least some of the suffering goes away and it's the same with something like sadness i mean if you're sad and your mind goes i don't want to be sad i want to be happy i want to be joyful then the sadness also turns into suffering and then you also have the temptation let's take something to either to eliminate the sadness let's take a pill let's watch a movie let's run away from the sadness and you're not only generating suffering for yourself in doing so you're also missing a large part of life life is definitely not just about joy and not just about pleasure it's also about pain and sadness they have a lot to teach us uh there can be a lot for example of of depth in in sadness and if you just you know all your life just run run away whenever sadness brings its head up then you're missing a a large part of life so when i talk about alleviating suffering i don't mean just let's find some pill that makes all the sadness and all the pain and all the anger and all the negative emotions just disappear from the world uh it won't work and if it does work well it will be a very very different world than the one we know um i'm also interested in in how you write about technology being able to create art or ai being able to write music now and and play chess creatively um but those examples are obviously very sort of mathematical examples do you think that extends to other arts that are less mathematical like writing the poem or um you know painting a a painting well it really goes to the question of what is out and i would be very happy to hear i mean i've been talking all the time and would be very happy to hear what what you think about it but a very common understanding is that art is about inspiring human emotions that in the end whether it's painting whether it's theater whether it's the movie or ballet or music or anything it's in the end comes down to the human experience we want to inspire maybe joy maybe sadness maybe anger maybe fear you go to a horror movie you go to a drama you go to a comedy the idea is let's inspire a particular human emotion now if it is true that the ultimate instrument that all artists are playing on is the human emotional system which is the human biochemical system there is a chance that computers could become the best artists in the world in the sense of you want joy i know how to press your biochemical buttons to produce joy you want to feel sad i know how to press your emotional keyboard to produce sadness now maybe out is not about inspiring human emotions but if it is there is a case to be made that in the not too distant future computers will be so good in manipulating human emotions that human artists will find it difficult to compete with them and this is why i would really like to hear your views on about both is it really what what art is about to inspire you and emotions and and if it is does it mean that maybe quite soon a lot of artists will be out of out of work um you know i don't understand the technology enough to understand if if technology would be able to really replace uh art of course for music it seems plausible because music is so much pattern and math it seems less plausible to me of course that's something like storytelling or painting that seems much more visceral and not something that could necessarily be like a product of an algorithm and be as effective as but i i don't know and and it's interesting to me that you say that um consciousness is a is this sort of mystery um but you have a real belief that emotion is this sort of biochemical algorithm um i don't how does how does that separate and and how do you think the subconscious which is also sort of a mystery but maybe somehow connects between emotion and consciousness and sort of woven throughout as opposed to being like some layered layered thing um how does how does that relate whether something seems like something that can be hacked and something is a complete mystery yeah i don't know i mean i mean i think almost nobody knows we don't understand consciousness well enough so we don't understand what what's happening there but we do again this is the gap between manipulation and understanding we don't understand the mind but we become extremely effective in manipulating it we do know how to produce emotions with greater and greater certainty both in human collectives and in individuals to the degree you know the most extreme cases is when in all kinds of uh um medical procedures uh you implant electrodes in people's brains and you can like with almost a hundred percent certainty you know the the doctor or the scientist presses a button and the person feels joy or fear and then the mind generates a story why i felt fear like we know the answer why you felt fear because dr x just pressed this button and it is connected by an electrode to your brain to the center of the fear to the amygdala or whatever so this is why you felt fear but the mind no the mind no no no there is something frightening about this scene this person looks to be very shady and it comes up with a story right um and so we don't and again i don't understand we don't understand but we can manipulate right which is i always think of the um the falling reflex you know when you fall asleep that's just a spinal cord reflex but somehow our brain makes the story that in our dream that we're falling that makes us feel like we're having that because of the story but the the impulse comes from your spine first and it goes right back to like our narrative tendencies that our narrative tendencies seem to explain our own body's uh reflexes more than the the other way like that behave that behavior precedes intention as opposed to intention proceeding behavior yeah and and and the danger is that when you get to the point you can manipulate people's emotion so well you know the political implications are really horrifying right because we know from history that for example in order to get a population to hate some group um you basically need to hijack their not just their fear system but their disgust throughout history you see again and again this trick that the first step towards ostracizing or persecuting or exterminating a group is you feel disgust towards them now discussed the mechanism of disgust evolved by evolution to protect us against disease against uh sources of of contamination like a feces or a an open wound or a corpse or a all kinds of vermin and things like that but then humans in history discovered that you can actually hijack these brain mechanisms and direct them not towards these disgusting things but against disgusting people and again and again you see in history that uh people like are compared with cockroaches are compared to disease they are like cancer they are and and uh they are a source of pollution so you know and even very large groups of people like women have often been considered a source of pollution in many religions why can't a woman be a rabbi why why can't a woman be a priest women are a source of pollution why can't you shake hands with a woman yeah and this is hijacking there is real pollution in the world you know uh again feces this is pollution but a woman isn't but people have found out how to hijack the disgust mechanisms in the brain and you know 20 years from now you can do that in a very precise way to individuals and make them really feel disgust towards whatever you want them to be disgusted by and this is extremely dangerous yeah there's something in in entertainment world that's very related i'm sure you know about this the they're sort of tracking devices now on tvs that track where your eyes go so that future television or films can make different stories for people depending on what they unconsciously are paying attention to so that i think it's actually an israeli developer who's developing it that um one of my friends was telling me that it was just presented to her that you know if you're paying attention even you don't realize more to this handsome man the story will gear towards him um whereas if another viewer is more interested in watching the cute little dog the story will go and follow them and it'll be kind of a choose your own adventure but based on your things that might not even be conscious to you this this kind of storytelling and it's something that's interesting in terms of the the the narratives and the storytelling like your your books are obviously being read all over the world movies and television for for for my industry is being seen much more widely because of but then there's also sort of a fracturing of narrative because there's so much access but there's just so much more content too so how do you feel that that fractured narrative that that might now be targeted towards people will affect the way people interact with each other because in a way you have a bigger chance to share a story with someone in china but you also have much less of a chance of maybe connecting to someone sharing a story with someone next to you because there's now 5 million tv shows to choose from yeah that's a very interesting question and a very interesting development i don't really know i mean so far the trajectory in history has been for thousands of years that there are fewer and fewer stories that more and more people share if you think for example about mythology so you know 5000 years ago you have a different mythology in almost every village and every valley and then gradually a very small number of mythological stories took over the entire world and we constantly see them and hear about them everywhere even in in non-religious contexts they kind of become the basic metaphors and the basic narratives for understanding the world like yeah i don't know i think i mentioned harry potter before which i really like the books so but some kind of a disappointment for me came at the end that what will happen in the end i want to know what how will it end and then what happens in the end he dies he comes back to life defeats defeats the the saves the world i'm sure i heard it somewhere before i mean you know it's not a really original story in the end we go for the most familiar mythology and this was not like that five thousand years ago you had so many different versions and it's the same way as fairy tale tales when the green brothers in the early 19th century they went about collecting german fairy tales so they were like 200 versions of hansel hendell and gretel like every grandmother in every village told a different story a little different story and the grand brothers they decided okay grandmother from this village this will be the canonical story of hansel the gretel and now you have i don't know millions of people that know this story just this one story this just this one version so we had this um constant more and more concentration fewer and fewer stories that everybody knows and we are now seeing a kind of of divergence a breakup for example certainly in television that if 20 years ago certainly when i was a kid in israel in the 1980s we just had one channel so everybody saw the same show i mean there was nothing else and now ever you have different sections of societies watching very different shows um where is it going we'll wait and see i mean i think um we're going to we just have about 10 minutes left that's been so fascinating i wish we could have gone on for hours i've had hundreds of questions and my god you were all smart um i think we've covered quite a few of them so i think we're only going to manage um two possibly three at the very most but one um and there's been a number of themes coming up and a lot of people have wanted to speak about me too so there's a question from a woman um coralie sonic who says in your opinion what led women to share their story me too at this specific time in history and natalie we'd love to hear your thoughts on it too um well tarana burke who started the metoo movement clearly utilized technology in a very um powerful way that gave i think really gave um gave women a sense of solidarity and the safety in numbers and we're seeing it today with the very emotionally impacting kavanaugh hearings in washington in in my country which is very very difficult to watch but also very inspiring because of the courage of people who have been silenced for a very very long time and that um you know i think i think one one woman inspires another and then it becomes a movement and then people realize that they're protecting each other and protecting i think also it was a revelation because so many so many people not just women um were were silent about their experiences that i think so people didn't realize how widespread it was and people thought they were alone and the technology actually made them realize that there were others like them and not only others like them but many times others with the same perpetrator and i think also once people realized that their silence could potentially hurt other people they started to come out and also that when they realized that their their um their speaking out could help support another person who had come forward to help their credibility um they also bravely came out because unfortunately it is still so devastating for people who come forward their lives are extremely um impacted and and and really they they're terrorized they're harassed they have horrible horrible repercussions for coming forward still after all of this today and so it's it's it's very disheartening to hear anyone say that women are coming forward for their own benefit or to get attention or to no one's hired anyone because they've come forward about a claim um so so you really see the kind of um sisterhood and solidarity and um a decision to to say that this is unacceptable and and and now that it's been revealed i think even to people who were victims of this kind of behavior i don't think anyone realized how widespread it was and that's been something that's been really revelatory in some of the women who've come forward is and and men but but but some of the the people who've come forward some some people's reaction are like oh everyone's had that it's a bad date and that should be an example of how ubiquitous it is not that it's okay but that this is a widespread cultural disease that we are living with and sickness if every woman has had a date with a guy who's been too aggressive with her that she's felt like she's need to leave at some point then that's a problem like that's a problem that that is in our entire society and that doesn't mean that we need to punish all the men who have done that it means that we we need to change the behavior for everyone and and show our boys and our girls and those who identify in between um that that behavior is no longer something that we're comfortable with and to be aware of the other person and their desire to care about the other person's desire sorry that was a speech [Applause] do you want to edit that um i don't know why it started just now uh could have started you know 100 years ago uh in terms of the of the necessity probably wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago i would just say that you know you have now all these people who say well it's gone too far what i'm curious about whether the people who now feel this urge well i must write now now i must write something to the newspaper to say it's gone too far did you five years ago wrote something to the newspaper to say that sexual harassment has gone too far if not then why the sudden urge to speak up about this this is i what i don't understand i think um i think we're going to have to wrap up in about five minutes but i have one last question and it's somebody who likes to have the last word it's from god and it says have religions in general had a positive or negative impact on humanity score it one to five where one is very bad and five is very good so both of you have to answer this one go first oh god oh god no you please um i don't know two it's done some good definitely i don't think that um i mean it's that it's all bad a lot of the morality of humanity of out of the again the ability to make people trust one another and cooperate is due to the various religions but they've also done a tremendous amount of harm and suddenly not all religions are the same in terms of the amount of good and the amount of harm that they have done but ultimately both in the past and also today i don't think they are really necessary uh full morality or for trust or for cooperation in the end morality is about reducing suffering in the world you don't need to believe in this god or that god in order to act morally you need to have a deep appreciation of suffering i do think that we need spirituality as against religion in all times in all cases but for me spirituality and religion are totally different things they are almost the opposite of one another spirituality is about questions and religion is about answers spirituality is when you have this big question like what is consciousness or what is the meaning of life or who am i or what is the good and you go on a quest to find uh to find out the answer to this question and you have the courage the willingness to go wherever this question takes you because it's very important to you religion is about answers it's when somebody comes and says this is the answer you must believe that if not you will burn in hell or we will burn you and this innovates the antithesis of spirituality and i think that in the 21st century we need probably spirituality more than ever before because a lot of spiritual questions and philosophical questions are suddenly becoming practical questions questions about free will about what is the meaning of humanity what does it mean to be human which you know people argue about for thousands of years but had very little immediate implications what you think it's just you know a pastime for philosophers suddenly it becomes a question for engineers because we are able or soon we will be able to start re-engineering humans so a question like what does it mean what does humanity mean what is the essence of being human it moves from the realm of abstract philosophy to the realm of engineering and this is why we need to engage with these kinds of questions far more and um even corporations like google and facebook and so forth i think they really need philosophers and they really need experts on spirituality to understand what they are doing religion on the other hand i think it has done whatever good or bad it could have done for humanity and it's it's now losing more and more of its power it's still very important for people's identity but most of its traditional roles i mean in the past religion you know it determined agriculture and medicine if you are sick you go to the priests if you if there is no rain you go to the temple to pray and all these things have been taken over by science and technology and the engineers and the doctors and what is left is really defining collective identities for human groups and in this religion is now mostly harmful i think because instead of encouraging uh global unity the main thing it does it is at present is to support uh tribalism and nationalism and prevent greater human collaboration i think we might actually have to end it there but um thank you so much that was the most fascinating brilliant conversation um you are both titans of intellect um can i ask you just to give them all both a huge round of applause you

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 357,897

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Natalie Portman, Homo Sapiens, Jewish, Israel, Religion, God, New Age, Automation, Futurism, JObs, Homo Deus, Trump, Politics, Future

Id: 87XFTJXH9sc

Length: 82min 30sec (4950 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 29 2018