Yuval Noah Harari & Newsweek Belgium: "The Future of Sapiens"

we have time for like 10 15 questions and we'll kick it off the people asking the questions are there and we kick it off with a law student from JV dear professor Harare I am now you me and I am very grateful that I can ask you a question tonight so in your first book Scythians I could learn about this capacity that humans have to tell stories and I really have the feeling that there is a huge contrast between our amazing intellectual capacity of telling stories and our primitive reactions in certain situations when we take an example like a topic like migration we can see that many people still have very primitive and animal kind of reflections with arguments that basically come down to this is my territory I will protect it I will not be invaded by strangers and while I wonder and I suppose that my question to you professor Harare is do you believe that we humans will ever be capable of inventing a story that is strong enough to surpass these primitive reactions in order maybe to take into account the basic needs of every person on this planet it's a very important question a couple of quick responses first of all it's not just about it it's easy to invent stories the difficulty is in convincing a lot of people to believe in the same story and this is what culture is really about and again when I tell you something is a story some people imagine okay I think okay so it's very easy to change it or it's not important but no stories are the most important thing and they are very difficult to change because people has a very strong attachment to that and we should be aware of that so if you think about migration for example to people who have very different stories in their minds it's very difficult for them indeed to live together and it's nobody wants to give up their own story which what makes migration so difficult for everybody involved so it's not about just coming up with a story that everybody can accept but it's actually understanding what is happening in people's minds and and it can take generations I mean successful migration or successful integration of different human groups it never happens overnight it takes decades it often takes generations so we should be very clear and honest about the difficulties involved and yes I hope that you know to survive in the 21st century we need stories that are global because the challenges we face our global to deal with nuclear war to deal with climate change to deal with disruptive technologies with like AI we need to transcend the differences between different nations and cultures but to do that we first have to acknowledge the depth of these attachments and the difficulty in overcoming them and not to be naive about about our ability to do so so I hope this this answered the question yes thank you very much thank you thank you no me [Music] [Applause] next question is from grass fella from the University of Antwerp very good evening my name is grace and I study French in Spanish at the University of answer and my initial mindset on studying languages was that a socialized human being like us should at least master one or two to be able to interact with the world around us but if I interpret what you write in your books correctly namely that AI will eventually translate better than any human can I start thinking that what I do has no more economic value or benefit on the job market so what I would like to ask you is what I do is it still relevant and how do I prefer for my future the important question is studying relevant yes so it again there are several levels here on the one hand studying a language is not just for economic benefits okay I can record a translator it also learned a lot you have a different perspective on life so it's not just about the economic benefits if you more narrowly focus just about the question of jobs then this is a much broader question not just about translators there are a lot of jobs that people do today that people learn study how to do this job today that might disappear within 20 years the fact is that nobody knows what the job market would look like in 20 years it's the first time in history that we are in this situation my best advice is that it's dangerous to focus on a narrow skill and put all your hopes on that like to learn a human language or to code in a computer language or to drive a truck or anything like that could be automated in the next 20-30 years so the most important skills in the 21st century are how to constantly learn new things how to reinvent yourself throughout your life so I I would say that for that you need a lot of emotional intelligence and mental flexibility these are maybe the most important skills because the one thing we know for sure about the job market of 2040 or 2050 is that it will be very volatile the idea of a a single career for life I have one job for my entire life is probably or completely obsolete so people will need to reinvent himself again and again and that demands not just the capacity to learn throughout life but a lot of emotional intelligence and mental flexibility as every human is every human being able to do that to be that flexible so I mean we need to incorporate this into educational systems today not in 2014 2048 will be too late and that's very difficult it's much more difficult to teach emotional intelligence then dates of battles in history it's much more difficult to teach mental flexibility then an equation in physics so again like in with regarded the previous questions which should have been naive it's going to be very difficult and the danger is that a lot of people will remain behind especially in developing countries a relatively prosperous country like Belgium will probably be able to invest in retraining people and also helping them to cope psychologically with the difficulties of transitioning again and again but many countries around the world might not be able to do it so the the really big problem I think is on the global level of rising global inequalities the countries which will benefit the most from the automation revolution and the AI revolution will do extremely well but other countries could completely collapse and this will of course affect everybody not just these countries next question is from a radio host from Eminem that's a youth radio station Tom the book the best radio station in Belgium at 6:00 and thank you for existing and speaking out thank you my question actually elaborates a little bit on what you just said so you told us we are going to be become a different species species we're going to evolve but there's a big problem with that we don't like things that are different than ourselves I myself am married to wonderful husbands we have adopted a beautiful girl with Asian roots and we live a wonderful life but as we already heard in the other questions there's always see no phobia and homophobia and racism and religious fanaticism and populism and fake news around the corner so I was wondering as you were already explaining a little bit will we be able to evolve or will things just get worse and so much worse that we will go back instead of go forwards because that's what I'm afraid of because we just love to hate and that's a global problem well I don't know I I hope things will improve what we can say again based on history that we have seen immense improvement in in these areas over the last few decades homophobia now is bad but it was far far worse fifty years ago so bad that in many places you couldn't even talk about it it was unmentionable similarly with all the problems we have with the rise of extreme nationalism and populism and xenophobia it's important to take things in in perspective and also to be grateful about what we have already achieved otherwise people despair or people are think that and one of the things that is fueling exactly these tendencies is the sense that nothing has been achieved and as the system is completely not not functioning so it's important to realize the immense achievements and be grateful for them not in order to then do nothing but to first of all protect what we already achieved and secondly realize that yes we can do that so if you look for example at Europe with all the talk of the rise of nationalism and xenophobia a century ago Europeans were killing each other by the millions exactly here in the battlefields of Belgium and in the Western Front over small differences in culture and language and possession of this bit of territory oh that bit territory now even when you look at the you know that something that breaks it for me as a historian the amazing thing about brexit is that as far as I know only one person lost her life during the entire process from the pre referendum arguments were these difficult years until now very very little violence in historical terms you know in previous eras a question like this whether Britain should be part of a big European Union or not could only be resolved through a major war with thousands maybe millions of casualties now not people just vote about it can be angry they can fight and argue but relatively little violence it's the same when you look at other parts of Europe I hope I mean it can exert a guarantee for the future things can go really downhill from here but we should understand that this really gives us hope that human nature is not our destiny yes something like xenophobia is in our genes but it's not our destiny we can do something about it actually every nation is a triumph over xenophobia because genetically or in evolutionary terms we are programmed to be fearful and even hateful of anybody we don't know personally for hundreds of thousands of years we lived in small intimate communities of maximum a hundred hundred and fifty individuals and anybody else was a stranger to be feared and hated today even small nations like I come from Israel we have eight million citizens I don't know 99.99 percent of these people and still I can feel connected to them again pay my taxes so that somebody I don't know in a distant City will get good health care so actually nationalism is already a triumph over xenophobia and as for homophobia I'm really baffled by it I don't know of any good evolutionary explanation for it I would think that straight guys would be extremely glad when you know there is less competition you know thank you thank you Tom the next question comes from a canvas viewer and that's the mayor so my name is Ludwig the mayor I have a master's degree in computer science and in bio engineering nowadays we are able to harvest genetically modified crops which leads to a monoculture in the near future we will be able to manipulate our DNA maybe we will all opt for the brains of Einstein and the muscles of Usain Bolt according to you well we also and evolved into a monoculture with all identical species of the homo sapiens actually my main fear is the opposite that we'll see a process of speciation that what are today class differences between Homo sapiens will eventually become differences biological differences between different species previously in history it was never possible to translate economic inequality into biological inequality but in the not so distant future it could be possible and that's very dangerous only some people will have the resources to opt for the brain of Einstein of all the muscles of you stay onboard so I think that that's an even bigger danger and most specifically to your question I would say that the danger is that humans are very good in manipulation they are often very bad in understanding the full consequences of these manipulations it's easier to build a dam over a river than to anticipate all the different effects this will have on the ecosystem similarly it will be much easier to say try to amplify intelligence using the reticle engineering than to understand all the different consequences this will have for the human mind and for for society you change one gene you think it improves intelligence but it has so many other effects and you know just improving intelligence and if you define intelligence in a narrow way and you don't take for example emotional intelligence into account is extremely dangerous so then my fear which is based on history is that when humans have power to manipulate they are very often tempted to use it long before they have the necessary wisdom to understand what will actually be the consequences of these manipulations thank you [Applause] hi I'm confirming hello I'm an a visual artist first of all thank you for your lecture is very inspiring do you think that artificial intelligence will be part of our DNA and will it posts on true procreation and will it replace the the natural mutation and what does it mean for Humanity in that case and what does it mean for art I mean what is the rule at the end well we might use AI to change our genes not by implanting computer chips into the DNA but simply as I just said it's the genetic the human is so complex to understand what the consequences of changing this gene of this group of genes that without the help of AI and and computer is aaalac completely impossible to make any serious progress in that direction we might also see like I said in the talk basically the the merger of humans and computers and you will outsource more and more decisions to your second brain basically to an AI which accompanies you and monitors you all the time whether it's good or bad it has both immense positive and immense negative potential and it's impossible to tell in advance well we'll go with regard to out the real question is how we define out in the modern world the tendency in many cases is to see the main function of art as exploring and inspiring human emotions it wasn't like that throughout history but in the modern world this is the typical definition you create a work of art a piece of music painting a TV show mainly to explore and inspire certain emotions in humans and the thing is that if this is the purpose of art very soon AI is likely to be a much better artist than almost any human being because it could decipher the human emotional system which is a biological system and learn how to play on it like on a keyboard you want to inspire fear you want to inspire compassion you don't you want to inspire a joy for this particular person you show that or you show something else that will create ivities disappear the end it depends on definitions I mean some people say well creativity is like the last line of defense of the humans the scenes with a radius the picture you paint here but the thing is that which shouldn't overestimate the abilities of AI but then also we often tend to overestimate the ability of humans but kind of balances off I mean many in many cases for humans to creativity in the end boils down to pattern recognition and pattern recognition is something that computers are now doing better and better in numerous fields in chess for example already today creativity is a sign of computer intervention when you have a game today we still have games between humans only even though everybody knows computers plays much better and the problem in in these competitions is how how can we be sure that one of the players isn't getting advice from a computer and one of the method methods to find out is to monitor the the moves they're making and if they make a very creative and original move immediately the alarm sounds that's public computer move but it's one thing to play chess itself one to paint something that will touch people yes so it again we are not there yet with painting or miss music or even with TV but the thing is that if in the end it's about human emotions and UHN emotions are a biological fan is our biological pattern anger hatred joy laughter their biological patterns in the not-too-distant future with enough biological data and enough computing power AI will be better than humans in knowing how to inspire joy particularly new it might will not work for anybody else but just for you you know how do I know what you're feeling right now I'm basically analyzing signals coming from you mainly your tone of voice and your facial expression and your body language and I recognize patterns I'll keep it on a big smile yeah so okay I saw a million smiles before I kind of know what it means it's recognizing a pattern now a computer would be able to do all that even better than humans and do something far more which is go under the skin I can't access directly your heart or your brain right now I'm basing my analysis just on external signals but with a biometric sensor a computer could directly access what is your heartbreak rate right now what is your blood pressure which areas in the brain are working and based on that computers will be able to understand human emotions or to analyze human emotions even better than human artists they still might not have any emotions of their own but they might reach a point when they can understand and play on our emotional keyboard better than any human being let me say I'm happy tonight that's not happening kun Temecula asked the question thank you next question is from artists Vinnie she's also a compass viewer yes indeed good evening mr. Lawry my name is Agnes and after burnouts I lead a different life for the moments it is my personal opinion that a burnout is not a personal pure personal matter but that we suffer a global burnouts I see that the scale of challenges that we face today as humanity is impressive and I wonder how can one find courage and strength and not become powerless and desperate and how can one copy this crisis and in fact in turn this whole situation into a situation of positive active hope [Applause] [Music] I think that the key is to be realist and to have a good balance of being aware of the problems and challenges but not feeling that everything is lost you know look you look at something like climate change so on the one hand we should avoid this denial mode that no nothing is happening it's all a hoax but equally we should we should avoid the feeling that it's hopeless there is nothing we can do about it in in this case for example if humanity had the right motivation it would have been relatively easy to solve the problem of climate change to solve climate change we don't need to go back living in caves and eating roots actually to solve the climate crisis we need to invest just about 2% of global GDP that's the magic number if humanity invested now 2% of global GDP in dealing with climate change by investing in new technologies new industries different subsidies and so forth we can solve it 2% is still a lot of money it's about the same amount that humanity spends on armies on defense on guns 2% of GDP is roughly what most countries spend on defense now if there was a world war as I assure you countries will spend far far more than 2% on armaments on war so if you think about it well this is the kind of world war that we brought on ourselves but we are on all in it together then we can do that so the issue is not to despair and to realize that we have immense powers it's a question of where we invest them thank you very much next question comes from a TV host and that's Marcel fan tilt a good evening very famous in Flanders yes my name is Marcel I presented already on the TV is sometimes sing songs you're already were there our Belgian government is planning to spend 4 billion euro on new f-35 fighter planes but last week last week a big Belgian company a textile company and a smaller city came to a halt because unknown untraceable urban hackers yeah put them to a stop what's the point of spending so much money on arms while you can spend them on social security pensions nurses education maybe the arts how would you spend 4 billion dollar euro well again doing my usual thing taking the long perspective things are much much better than in any previous time in history if you go back a couple of centuries then something like 70 80 percent of the budget of the government or of the King goes to defense if you go back to the Middle Ages to the county of Flanders the count of flanders spent Ayano ninety percent of his budget on building castles and paying knights and crossbowmen ten percent on having festivals and jousts and tournaments and things like that and zero percent on public health or education there was just nothing like there is no health minister in the county of Flanders in the Middle Ages now as I said before most government I don't know specifically about Belgium but I would be surprised if it's much more than two percent education and wealth and health care most governments spend far more on education and health care than they spend on defense so we have progressed Squier a lot we only spend like under even two percent on the arts so that might be going up a little bit yeah I'm okay arts is more eternal than politics and countries and religion depend what kind of out I mean some out you know we think that out is like eternal because we remember Euripides and we remember Leo da Vinci we don't remember the kind of bad out that was very common in ancient Greece and just very little survived with it so and again in Judea hundred in the ancient Greece and again like I mean some of the other answers we need not to be too naive in our understanding of the world and of humanity I wish that I could tell you that we can do without any armies and defense forces it's just completely unrealistic the world is still a very dangerous place and Wars I was still a possibility and yes there is the logic of the arms race if we are then the other side also arms and so forth but like in most things I would recommend a gradual improvement and not a utopian revolution we have made immense progress in the last couple of decades in reducing armament all over the world and that was gradual if any idea that in a single year we can just abolish all the armies and all the iron it almost never works utopian revolutions tend often to backfire if somebody comes and promises to you paradise next year if you just vote for me run away it never works thank you thank you and there are a lot of politicians here tonight I think they've heard your message luckily we had the elections only last year so clear from the falda it's the next conference for you with a question good evening I'm Claire von de Velde I studied biology and I've been looking at animals from some years and then I switched to humans I found them much more in there also humans have the capacity to be conscious of love of feeling love which direction is it going to take well our capacity of love be going down in line with the downfall of our capacity to smell or will it take the other direction and where our ability of to love evolved to be more strongly developed as future upgrades of human minds would be realized with artificial intelligence it's a good question [Music] and don't look for any prophecies because it really depends on the decisions that we take in the coming years in the coming decades we can use the same technology to create very different kinds of societies very different kinds of humans part of the problem is that love is much more complex than something like discipline like to measure it and also generally speaking it's far less economically profitable so if we leave these kinds of decisions just in the hands of the free market we are likely to get far less love you know you look at today the kind of epidemic of fake news it's mostly motivated by this arms race to capture human attention and keep it on my platform on my website and some of the smartest people in the world over the last few years worked on this problem of how to grab how to grab people's attention and keep it and unfortunately what they discovered it's much much easier way to captures people attention is to press the fear button of the hate button in the brain not the compassion button and therefore most of the of this epidemic of you know faking it you could have created fake news that encouraged compassion but that's very very rare because economically it makes no sense so this this is just a small kind of warning sign to us that if we leave these kinds of technologies just in the hand of the free market we are going to be very disappointed with the results usually the argument goes of you know the big corporations that you know it's a free market if people don't want it nobody forces them to buy it but it doesn't work like that but it's compassion never profitable not never but generally speaking it's it's usually far less profitable than greed and you know again to take a simple example like you have now in the US I don't know how it is in here but in the US this issue of food in schools so the previous administration bend certain foods like pizza and sweet drinks in schools but the current administration is abolishing these regulations yes you can sell pizza and cocaine in schools and the argument is you know it's a free country if the kids don't want to buy pizza nobody forces them to buy it and eat it but that's this ingenious I mean the thing is that very often with these new technologies and these big corporations they find our weaknesses and use them against us too and it's it's often unfortunately much easier to amplify people's weaknesses than to amplify their strengths if you ask me for advice on how to increase fear or hatred very very easy how to increase compassion that's much much more difficult and this is why it's so dangerous to just leave these decisions to to the free market the future is female heaven Nagendra class than Saskia the coaster hi I'm and I'm an author and I would really love to write the sequel to the sequel of the wonderful and best-selling handmade silk by Margaret Atwood so here's my question to you and that is when in your view will women finally take over it's a bit of a provocative question maybe but I mean given the fact that women still have this reproductive power enhance and when it comes to education and so economical seriously become more and more equal to men well again people are constantly asking me for processes and I don't really know yeah I want the exact what I can really offer is mainly about the past as a historian we still don't understand why is it that in most human societies in history men have dominated women now the common explanation that men are physically stronger and more aggressive makes very little sense because in most human societies in most human organizations it's not physical strength rather it's social skills that are the key to be dominant to be to be dominant if you look at human organizations from politics to a religion you don't become Pope by beating up all the other Cardinals you need to build a coalition of supporters and there are a couple of politicians here that I guess know much more about that than me and to build a coalition of supporters you need to compromise you need first of all to understand what other people are want what other people think now the usual story is that women are much better at it than men who are far more self-centered didn't think only about themselves and so forth and so on so how come that in a species in which social skills are the key to political and economic dominance still men dominate women and it's not like in all species like that in bonobos among elephants its females who dominate despite being physically weaker we still don't have a good explanation for why in human societies men usually have dominated women again over the last century there has been a tremendous revolution you know there have been so many revolutions in history that did not change at all the gender structure so that people thought this is eternal and natural and then within a century or so the feminist revolution completely changed gender relations there are still things to do of course but the change is really amazing and most evolved gradually throughout the next few years yeah but the really amazing thing is how peaceful it was you know how many people died in the Bolshevik Revolution and what it is achieve how and you compare that order of the French Revolution and then you get the feminist revolution they didn't need to kill anybody and they changed society more than perhaps any previous revolution in history so again I I don't know what will happen next but I think there is room for optimism on that front also there's a follow-up is sorry Sasuke our time is limited let's talk about education hit the Necker well I'm the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and philosophy of Kent University the third female Dean in 200 years and I would like to ask you something about the future role of the humanities if any in the rather dystopian world that you have sketched especially in the first part of your lecture will we in fact be able to rescue humanism by continuing the search for beauty wisdom and truth what do you think yeah I think we should I think that the humanities philosophy history out are now maybe more important than ever before because you know finally after thousands of years that philosophers were discussing all kinds of questions which had very little impact on how people actually live these questions are now becoming not philosophical questions but practical questions of engineering for thousands of years philosophers have been asking themselves if you could enhance human beings in what way would you do it what qualities are really important for human beings and this was you know really a philosophical discussion with very little impact on how people live now it's moving from the philosophy department to the engineering department but what I think the Philosopher's should move with it they should acquaint themselves with genetics with AI and some of them do and because we need their contribution on these questions we can't leave it to the just the technicians and the engineers to make these decisions even on a much smaller scale you think about something like a self-driving vehicle to put the self-driving vehicle actually on the road you need to answer some very deep philosophical questions that philosophers have been grappling with for thousands of years the example everybody gives is the the car speeds and on the road that only two kids jump in front of the car and the only way to save them is to swerve other side and maybe hit a truck which kills the owner of the car who is asleep in the backseat now what do you do this is exactly the kind of questions that philosophers argued about for thousands of years with very little impact on human behavior because even if you say yes I should of course sacrifice myself to save the kids in the moment of crisis you don't act from your intellect you act from your guts you forget all about philosophy you are moved by your immediate emotions now with surviving vehicles to put them on the road you need to program the algorithm what to do in such a situation and for the first time in history you can be certain that the answer you reach will actually be implemented you can take the best philosophers in the world put them in a room they can discuss it for a year and what they decide you can implement in the algorithm and you have a hundred percent of 99 percent guarantee this is actually what the car will do and we need this input if we just leave it again to the free market the result will be probably being that they will have two models the Tesla altruist and the Tesla a waste and you know the customer is always right if most people buy the test like waste well it's not our fault this is what the customers want thank you the last question of the night is more personal one it comes from my colleague Thomas from the freakin good evening mr. Aria thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us tonight my question indeed is a bit more personal you've called yourself a prophet tonight or you use repeatedly denier well that's what I want to ask you because one of the side effects about being as massively successful as you are as an intellectual is that you yourself have become the object of adoration there is even more or less a religious cult in certain groups around you and I ask myself how do you as an intellectual do you have an explanation for that and how do you experience that evenings like this yeah so it's I need it in it intimidating for me and I think very dangerous to raise any person to that level of a prophet or a guru because then what happens is that the people who look up to that guru they stop making efforts by themselves to understand and to come up with solutions they just expect somebody else to provide the answers and they accept them whatever they are that's very very dangerous it's all the dangerous to the person in question he or she might start believing that and then you makes you crazy so I again I repeatedly tell people that I don't know what will be in 20 years and 50 years and this they don't it'll somehow they don't hear they listen very carefully to what I say except for this and I also try to you know really observe what's happening in my own mind I meditate every every day I do two hours of the Vipassana meditation I go every year for a long retreat of between 30 or 60 days of just observing what is happening in my own mind and I don't think that I could have written the books in the first place or survived the consequences without the kind of mental balance that this practice gives me because when you look when I look at my own mind I really see how little there is to admire because you know there is so much garbage in the mind of everybody all right or at least I'll just testify about myself aren't you bit hard for yourself now because everybody here for 5000 just watching you not being any garbage yeah because I'm very careful about what comes out of my mouth you know we have today in the world this cult of the authentic leaders was in a world are very popular in these circles except in one place between the mind and the mouth there they want immediate access whatever pops up in the mind immediately let it go through your mouth and we have this cult of the authentic leader that says whatever comes up in the mind and that is very very dangerous I think that again there are several politicians is hearing in in the hall and lots of voters I don't want authentic leaders I don't want authentic politicians I want responsible leaders and politicians now as you can see from the reaction you've hit a nerve yeah authenticity is very important in out it's very good to be authentic when you go to meet your therapist but not in government there again when I look just at myself how many things just pop up in the mind which are full of fear and full of hatred and I shouldn't act from there and I get up because it pops up in your mind you should yeah just because something popped up in my mind that is not a good enough reason to share it with the rest of humanity so personally I find that again meditation is really helpful thank you in dealing with this Thank You Thomas for your question and let's all make a promise to you all five thousands of us will keep thinking for ourselves [Music]

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 205,159

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Id: l7_4KXVvgyM

Length: 49min 37sec (2977 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens and Homo Deus - both were excellent books. I just bought his latest book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Anyone interested in transhumanism should definitely read this guys work.

[u/infinitum17]

This was a great Q&A. Does anybody know where I can find the actual talk he gave before this?