Yuval Noah Harari: Panel Discussion on Technology and the Future of Democracy

good morning everyone i'm alexis pabachelas welcome to the athens democracy forum i'm very privileged today to have to moderate a great panel which will be about democracy and technology we have with us here yuval harari a great global thinker thank you both for being here thank you for inviting took us a while to convince you to come to athens but i'm glad you're here we have brad smith who is a global influencer i suppose and you know a great business leader president of microsoft thank you for being with us it's great to be here and we also have a practitioner uh who fights uh the fight of democracy on the front lines kirsten davis who is the founder of sangxi and also has been with the new york times for for a long time um i want to ask you first of all i'll start with you yubel and is democracy under um under threat at this moment well i guess it's always under threat because you know whereas dictatorships are like weeds they can grow almost everywhere they don't need a lot of conditions to to survive democracy is like a rare flower that demands a lot of preconditions in order to to succeed and it's only very recently in human history that humans even managed to create large-scale democracies i mean for most of history at least after the agricultural revolution democracies managed to exist only in small places like city-states like ancient athens so i would say that at any time we should be careful to preserve democracy but you think at this point with technology advancing rapidly with social media and everything else is democracy at an exceptionally risky period of history uh in a way yes because we are facing a completely new threat that we have never known before in brief technology now enables the creation of completely new totalitarian regimes digital dictatorships for the first time in history it's possible to monitor all the people all the time it wasn't possible in the soviet union it wasn't possible in nazi germany it is becoming possible now and secondly for the first time in history it's becoming possible for an outside system to know me better than i know myself and that is a threat to human freedom which never existed before stalin could never really know me better than i know myself but now it's possible okay we'll get back into this because this is a very important part of the conversation but i want to ask you about democracy again and you know brad one thing i we've been observing i've been observing is that you know anywhere from peoria illinois to a village in northern greece you see conspiracy theories you see people losing trust in the pillars of authority media government everything else do you think that you as a you know a leader of a tech company have some responsibility some blame to serve for this i think we have a huge responsibility because we have a significant role to play i think that technology is agnostic in a sense that it will be used for good or ill depending on the people who put it into application it'll either be used as a tool or as a weapon uh and yeah in the world today i think we have to put it first in the current day context i very much agree that democracy is always a fragile thing um but i think it is in a more precarious state today than it has been you know perhaps since the 1930s i think technology is one of the significant reasons perhaps george orwell made only one mistake when he wrote his famous book seven decades ago he perhaps should have entitled his book 2024 instead of 1984 he just saw all of this coming as it turned out four decades earlier than it has and i think it puts it very well to say that you know with technology today it is indeed possible to apply the kind of mass surveillance that he envisioned and in ways that he couldn't have imagined as you put it it becomes possible for someone else to know you perhaps better than you know yourself that's a very dangerous proposition okay kirsten i think that it's it's definitely a threat and i think actually one of the risks is that we keep we have a tendency to look back and to look to the uh maybe older bastions of democracy we've heard a lot about the us and the uk over the last couple of days and also the institutions that were founded some 75 years ago um it says up here reimagining democracy and there are in fact a number of nations out there that are reimagining and recreating democracy i have the pleasure and the luck to be able to spend a lot of time in estonia where they have actually recreated their government and their public services using technology to actually create a a more empowered citizenship and i think one of the reasons for that is that they are actually uh probably closer to the threat both in terms of proximity and and what they've experienced over the last 20 years and so uh it is that threat the risk is is that i think we're maybe not looking up and wide enough and further enough far enough it's some of the solutions some of the ideas and summer practices that are actually already out there in the world and i think it would it would help us to maybe reimagine and recreate if we could follow some of those leads and examples but let me ask i mean there's been an effort to self-regulate the tech industry and the platforms in terms of content for example hate content and so on is that enough or should we move to the next phase which is regulation well i don't think in the history of business there has ever been an industry that has successfully regulated itself entirely you know we live in a world where for good reason we look to companies to exercise responsibility and we look for governments to apply laws that ensure that even those who are not thinking broadly are frankly required to hit some kind of minimum standard i do think that we're at a point where we need more laws we need more regulation but i also think it's important that that not give anybody a pass because it can become easy as well for companies to say look this is too hard we're just going to wait for governments to regulate us and until they do we'll just keep doing whatever anybody wants us to do we'll never live in a world where every government is going to have i think a complete regulatory model that we would say conforms with human rights standards around the world so we need both we need high standards by companies and we need governments to move faster and start to catch up do you think that tech industry is doing enough in terms of protecting us against this information and so on i think nobody is doing enough again i would say that uh the main responsibilities of the governments not of the companies yes i expect the companies to do more but ultimately this is the responsibility of governments and in some places they are not doing enough because they like it the situation is that is developing in other places they are just maybe not noticing the danger signs and but ultimately it's it's the business of the government you know sometimes i have a sense that uh you've talked a lot in your books about a class of people which feels useless right as technology progress and so on is it somehow the events of these people who feel useless to believe in the conspiracy theories to mistrust the system the authorities and so on you know conspiracy theories were always around it's not a new thing i mean the situation now is actually better than in most of history you look at the conspiracy theory as a time of the black death much worse you know the jews are poisoning the wells let's go and kill all the jews this is what what's happening in the 14th century uh whenever a new technology of communication comes up there is just a new method to spread the conspiracy theories when when you had the print revolution in europe in the 15th and 16th century the big bestsellers were not cupronicos and galileo galilei there are books like uh do-it-yourself witch-hunting one of the biggest bestsellers was malayus maleficaru the hammer of the witches which was a do-it-yourself guide to hide how to identify witches and kill them that was the big bestseller and if you look at the 20th century so you know something like nazism we call it an ideology but it's actually a conspiracy theory that managed to take over a country and start the worst war in history was a conspiracy about you know that the jews controlling everything from behind the scene and and and so forth so we should have a perspective on on what's happening now and the reason that conspiracy theories are so appealing throughout history is mainly that they are simple and flattering the problem with the truth usually is that the truth is complicated and it's painful a politician which will tell let's say in the u.s elections which will tell the american public the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the usa and its history has a hundred percent guarantee of losing the elections and it's the same in israel it's the same in india in italy nobody wants really to know the truth about themselves and also it's just complicated you know to understand how a virus works forget about the pandemic just understanding what a virus is it's just it's not even a living organism it's a piece of code that manages to take over your body how does it work so complicated much more much easier to believe that there are a bunch of billionaires who created this epidemic in a lab to take over the world but let me all ask you a question which has really dragged me for a while you know i mean we usually listen to the people around our own bubble right and we look down at people who you know love conspiracy theories or they go into this like really you know uh off the top kind of you know sites to look for answers the question for me is how do you reach out to these people they don't read the new york times or kathmandu they rarely watch network news or something like this how do you really sensitize them you know how do you tell them you know this is crap any ideas yes well i think it's an important question we've heard a lot about this and especially actually from some of the the younger panelists we've had over the course of the last couple of days um i work with an organization in estonia course sentinel.ai and we work uh to detect deep fakes to protect media and democracy we're doing that with uh with the government and many corporates but what we're trying to do now is also see how we can uh get an out there and educate the public on this and i think it's very much about putting yourself into their shoes and having the mindset and saying what does this mean for me as a person how is this going to impact me how can i make myself aware of it how can i react and how should i react what can i do and i actually see that many of the sort of youth organizations out there and citizen organizations are coming at some of these democratic challenges with this mindset and i think that's a much healthier mindset than the top-down approach that we see from some institutions or some governments maybe where they're just working with the larger tech organizations so i think there does to be need to be empowerment of the people and and we're seeking partnerships with academics with education and with citizenship organizations to help us do that when it comes to the deep fake issue right well i i would put it in the context of the fact that just here we are in athens yeah athenian democracy was based on this notion of having a conversation with the entire community because the entire community literally was engaged in the democratic process itself if you fast forward 2300 years and go to the early united states it was a democratic model that at first was you know frankly based on having very strict standards about who even got to vote and participate and over the course of two and a half centuries that became broader and broader to the point where obviously voting is available to everyone who is of a certain age and then you inject technology technology has played this ongoing role for leaders to communicate more broadly with the people they represent and if you look at people who have succeeded over the course of american history what you see is that abraham lincoln was elected in 1860 in part because of the power of the telegraph and the ability to use that to inject in this new idea of ending slavery you know into the american conversation franklin roosevelt basically prepared the united states for war and managed the country through the greatest depression by using radio in a way that no one had ever had before by bringing himself literally into people's living rooms through the power of radio john f kennedy and then ronald reagan really both really mastered television and i think one of the things that frankly donald trump did very well in 2016 was use social media and what it really calls on us to do i think is think about two things first it's back to your point you better get great leadership out of government itself because there is no substitute for it anywhere else that means you need great leaders that can use the medium of the time to connect with people broadly and not just narrowly but second we need to think about the technology and and the way it's organized and the way it's being managed and i think in my own opinion one of the biggest challenges right now is that it has turned us back into a community of different bubbles that are isolated from each other these other technologies kept broadening the reach we may have vigorously disagreed about the events of the day but at least we were talking about the same events and so we do have to return to i think sort of an understanding of how to ensure that technology fosters a more singular conversation and not a a series of silos one question is can machine learning help counter you know the the the damage that has been done because you know we know what algorithms did you know for a while could you embed in your platforms uh you know some methods that will detect deep fakes disinformation and so on there are there are so many ways that technology can help you know let's just take deep fakes as just one example to start with you know certainly yes in the first instance you know something like machine learning can and is increasingly being used to detect deep fakes reliance on that alone will always be imperfect because it becomes yet another cat and mouse game but in the same way that we've created a system to sort of combat counterfeit money where you create certain standards you know we're already at work to create you know what is a more secure media provenance system so that you know when the new york times publishes some content a video and the like it becomes much more difficult to tamper with it so it's a systemic technological approach that we need and i think what it really requires us to do is start to you break these problems apart take deep fakes as one problem how do we go solve it and then think about the other problems we need to go solve as well even within deep fakes there's those that are actually um creating the deep fakes those that are distributing the deep fakes and those that are the target that the deep fakes and we have to tackle them i think it was the unesco and itu report that put up some sort of 11 different ways to actually look at some of these things we can't just handle one part of it we have to handle the problem holistically yeah eva you have a question for brad or this um do you have as part of your recruiting and training system an ethics course for engineers for programmers i mean do you think that you know like a doctor cannot start practicing without going through a process of some some kind of ethical education and today i would say that computer engineers are the most important people shaping the world they are every time that they think they write code but they actually write human lives they shape society they need to understand the ethical and political implications of what they do so do you have an inbuilt ethical course and if not do you plan on doing something like that we have been developing such an ethical code for say microsoft on artificial intelligence i would first say i think the question that you've just posed is such a critical one to me it is deeply ironic that for example in the united states today you cannot graduate from one of the military academies without taking a course in ethics but you can get a computer science degree from most of the top 10 computer science universities in the united states or the world without ever taking a course in the ethics of say something for artificial intelligence or computing more broadly i do think there's cause for optimism in this space especially just the way momentum has accelerated over the last couple of years you know we defined in 2018 six ethical principles for ai and just in some reform you know it's around you know fairness or avoidance of bias protection of privacy safety and security inclusion transparency and accountability and we've been building a whole system of training engineers and identifying engineering practices and if you look at the trends around the world the most encouraging thing to me is that you see this convergence around a set of ethical principles i think what we're learning is that's just step one you know it sort of tells us the answers to the first round of questions there is so much more learning ahead of us that then gets then put into training i don't think by 2030 you'll be able to graduate and get a computer science degree without taking the kind of course that you've just mentioned it people have now and especially this next generation has now realized that they want to do things that are going to serve the world and not just create this agnostic code we don't have we can't wait 10 years i mean at least microsoft can just take a decision tomorrow morning or like you can leave this panel pick up the phone and okay from from tomorrow nobody is accepted to microsoft unless they have i don't know saw in so many points in ethics course um what i can say is the easiest thing for us to do is to say you won't be at microsoft for more than six months without taking a course that we give you ourselves and i think that's where we're going first and then we're encouraging the universities to get on board which books would you have a computer engineer read so many different ones um kathy o'neill weapons of math destruction if you know it yeah uh then uh surveillance capitalism um by shoshana zubov i think uh professor from harvard yeah i mean like they're the first two that came to my mind but there are so many others any any classics you know we are in athens so it's good to read plato aristotle philosophy i mean really i would say that the interesting thing of what's happening right now is that the questions that for thousands of years belonged to the philosophy department are now migrating to the computer science department you know philosophers are very very patient people they can argue about free will for 2 000 years reach no decision and that's fine but engineers who have to put a self-driving car on the road tomorrow or in two years they can't wait they can't wait for the philosophers so i would say it's more than just having a few principles of uh ethics for ai it's really learning how to think philosophically and ethically about different problems like you know you even design a tool for banks an algorithm to decide who to give a loan to and who not to give a loan to this shapes human lives and you need to under you need ethics for that because so many biases can be inadvertently built into your algorithm and the thing is that algorithms think in a different way than humans they make decisions in a different way one of the big problems with this algorithmic revolution is that more and more decisions will be taken in a way that humans simply can't understand if the bank refuses to give you a loan and you ask why the bank just says we don't know the algorithm said no we can show you all the data the algorithm went over but you know it's millions of pages you can't do nothing with it so the the place to intervene is when you design the algorithm and for that you need really not just a few principles you need it's a structure of thinking which comes from the world of philosophy and ethics and not just from the world of engineering but do you actually have faith that the industry will do this and bring it upon itself or you think government needs to step in again ultimately i believe this is the job of government you know the same way that you can regulate that doctors need to take certain courses before they can start practicing you can legislate it also for computer scientists it would be good if the industry will do it tomorrow because governments will take longer but ultimately uh yes i hope to see government action on on that on that level are you optimistic about self-regulation um well we've been hearing people call for it the the major tech organizations are calling for the government uh you know are calling for regulation because self-regulation just as brad said you know it would be lovely to think that it would work but let's be honest um one of the questions if i may for a second just take off my professional hat and put my citizen hat on is say that we've been talking about this for a very long time um there is a need to build on what the league of nations tried to do to create a digital geneva convention to build on the talon manual um this is clear the need is there you started talking about the digital geneva convention in 2017 i believe and and we we clearly hear the need so as a citizen i ask what is needed to make it happen what do we actually need to do we're clear that it's needed but with my citizen hat on as a citizen what can i do to actually have influence impact give empowerment to you yourself brad or whoever else is needed out there the great thinkers you know the great talkers and and how do we get from think talk to do and actually make this happen well i think there's two different concepts we're talking about here and it's worth thinking about how they come together because at one level i first of all i agree you know we need new international norms we need the world's democracies to step forward we need governments to recognize that they are the first and last line of not just defense but i think responsibility in addressing these issues and i do think that citizens actually have a voice one of the things that we've sought to do is think about diplomacy in the 21st century and you know the role for really citizen activism uh in people using their voice so we've been one of the companies that's actually been very supportive of civil society efforts you know to to use this technology to enable people to ensure their voices are heard i also think this does connect back with this other point um yeah i share your sense that you don't think that you can come up with a set of principles and feel like you're done i think if you create a set of principles you can think that you've begun you know you've started to identify the questions and some potential answers to me part of what we're talking about here is the need to recognize that technology development is now really a multi-disciplinary exercise you know from say the 1970s to i'll say the 2010s if you look at tech companies you know it it was really the the this great sort of castle filled with computer scientists and then data scientists and you know in the world today i we urgently need to educate the people who are creating technology in a much broader approach i think philosophy is a piece of it i actually think myself that history is a great piece of this i mean you read your books and you're reading history uh because you know history is the proving ground for these different ideas it's where you learn what worked and what failed and i've always found that you know there are lessons in what happened with society's attempt to regulate railroads that speak clearly to what we need to do to regulate the information technology today um you know so i do believe a lot of this starts in universities uh looking to the people in the engineering schools and the computer science departments to be getting a stronger dose from others of the liberal arts i think we're at a moment in time where people who you know major in the liberal arts really need a course in computer science and statistics and the like and we're going to need to help the rest of us catch up you know with what we didn't study when we were university students for example and bring that into businesses and into government and and i think actually throughout our entire life spans education is still perceived as something that goes on whilst you're at school in university um but because tech is changing so fast and we're using it throughout our lives i think education now needs to be a lifelong process we know that it's these 65 year olds who share the fake news and the conspiracy theories more often on social media in fact seven times more often than the rest of the population and so i think the the education around technology needs to now become a lifelong learning process and not just in the in the schools and universities can i ask you if there's progress if you can be candid about this within microsoft was there a time when the the financial or the tech guys that will look at you and say you know what are you talking about why should we bother about social justice or all these issues oh i think the climate today is vastly different from say you know the climate 27 years ago when i started at microsoft um yeah we always were fortunate as a company to have somebody like bill gates who was a very broad-minded thinker but yeah bill's been among those to say gee he thought in the early 90s that the best thing you know he could do to washington dc was ignore it you know and and you know that that that has changed now in part that's changed across the industry out of almost purely pragmatic conclusions well boy if you ignore governments they'll end up doing things to you that you don't like to me what we have today increasingly certainly at microsoft i feel it is a broader minded and more enlightened approach you know what fundamentally we rely on is not just attracting but retaining people who care deeply about doing something good for the world and they look to us as the company's leaders sometimes frankly perhaps even with unrealistic expectations about what we can do to solve the world's problems but that is a very powerful motivator our mission today is you know it's really grounded in empowering people and organizations around the world to to achieve more in what they're doing so yeah the the debates that we have on an ongoing basis are very much the debates that i think you would hope to see inside a company you know what is it going to mean for human rights if we provide facial recognition for this purpose or not what is it going to mean if we build a data center in this country and potentially subject data to being seized by that government and you know as we say we strive to be principled but we're only principled if we actually apply the things that we've called principles and and and be prepared to turn down business opportunity when they conflict you've talked about the covet crisis as a watershed moment in terms of surveillance data surveillance and so on explain to us your fears your concerns about this and how we can deal with it well i think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back the thing they will remember from the covet crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and if this is this was the moment when everything became monitored that we agreed to be surveyed all the time not just in authoritarian machines but even in democracies and maybe most importantly at all this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin because really we haven't seen anything yet i mean i think the the big process that's happening right now in the world is uh hacking human beings the ability to hack humans to understand deeply what's happening within you what makes you what what makes you go and for that the most important data is not what you read and who you meet and what you buy it's what's happening inside your body so we had these two big revolutions the computer science revolution or the infotech revolution and the revolution in the biological sciences and they are still separate but they are about to merge they are merging around i would say the biometric sensor it's the thing it's the gadget it's the technology that converts biological data into digital data that can be analyzed by computers and having the ability to really monitor people under the skin this is the the biggest game changer of all because this is the key for getting to know people better than they know themselves i often give the example from my own personal life that i realized i was gay only when i was 21 and i kept thinking about the time when i was 15 16 how could i have missed it you know something so important about myself should have been obvious but i didn't know now today or in five or ten years any algorithm uh of microsoft or amazon or the government would be able to know such a thing when i'm 12 or 13 just by monitoring what's happening in my body what's happening to my eyes when i let's say i see a boy and a girl walking on the beach where do my eyes focus so this is the crucial revolution and covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept to legitimize total biometric surveillance if we want to stop this epidemic we need not just to monitor people we need to monitor what's happening under the skin their body temperature like we walked in here we had to go through a body temperature test even in israel it has become a national security yeah so again i'm not against surveillance it's an important tool especially to fight epidemics the question is again who is doing it and how if you give it to the security service to do it that's extremely dangerous yes now they're using it to see whether you have the coronavirus but exactly the same technology can determine what you think about the government you know anger is a biological phenomena just like disease it's not some spiritual thing out there it's a biological pattern in your body with this kind of surveillance i mean you watch the big president a big leader gives a speech on television the television could be monitoring you and knowing whether you're angry or not just by analyzing the cues the biological cues coming from your body so now people are now watching us online all over the world this this conversation now maybe even right now the people who are watching us are being watched and analyzed and you know the thing is it's not just you're now watching this the thing is we know that you are watching this and we also know how you feel are you angry about what you hear are you frightened are you bald this is the kind of power that stalin didn't have you know when stalin gave a speech everybody of course clapped their hand and smiled now how do you know what they really think about stalin it's very difficult you can't have a kgb agent following everybody all the time even if even if you do it he's just watching your outside behavior he doesn't really know what's happening in your mind but in 10 years the future stalins of the 21st century they could be watching the minds the brains of all the population all the time and also they will have the computing power to analyze all that you know it's not just having an agent following everybody all the time the agent in stalin's days writes a paper report and it you have these millions of paper reports piling up in moscow somebody needs to read them to analyze them that's impossible now you don't need human agents you don't need human analyzers you just have a lot of sensors and an ai which analyzes it and that's it you have the worst totalitarian regime in history and covid is important because kovid legitimizes some of the crucial steps even in democratic countries kristen i actually well so your question is has covered been a watershed for data surveillance i actually think of it as being a temperature check for trust um because as you said when we come in we have to do a temperature check okay and that's actually kind of what's happened with the tracing apps that many of the governments have had have tried to put into place to monitor and to control we have not seen great uptake in these applications um because people thanks to uh you know cambridge analytica the social dilemma are now aware of the value of their data and how it could be used against them potentially so even when their lives are at stake now they're not prepared they do not trust their governments enough even with their life and their health in order to give their data by signing up for these um contact tracing apps so i think i would describe covert as being a temperature check for trust of governments in around data and data surveillance but if i want to ask you how far has technology progressed when you have the insider's view of this well i think technology has progressed quite a ways and i think these factors really come together and i think it's right to think about this as uh you know a moment of in time of of substantial historical significance first of all i think that the focus on biometrics is is the right one and i think that's why the debate on facial recognition is so important facial recognition is the first form of what is fundamentally you know biometric identification you know that has not only been widely deployed it's one that people actually use every day often to unlock their own phone but it's spread so broadly that now it has emerged as part of the public debate and you know as governments steer a course on facial recognition you know what they're really doing i think is creating a model that they may end up emulating for all forms of biometrics so it's really important to get that right and frankly i think it's really important to go beyond a relatively almost simple debate do we allow it or ban it to wait a second how do we regulate it what uses do we permit what uses do we ban i think the covet crisis is fascinating for both of the reasons that you all are describing first of all it is absolutely being used in some countries especially by authoritarian regimes to put more controls in place and in many ways even in the world's democracies the privacy issues around covet 19 are not really getting the full debates that i think they deserve you know it's one of the reasons that we as early as may you know came out with a set of requirements for our involvement in say tracing apps and we said look if all of this additional information is going to be available and needed in this time of crisis first it should be used only for this specific purpose and no other second it shouldn't be retained after the crisis passes third we should look for ways to minimize the privacy impact it's one of the reasons that i've been very enthusiastic about technology that keeps somebody's information on their own device rather than putting it where it can be accessed by someone else and then it's only shared in an anonymous way if somebody actually is notified that they've for example tested positive because what we're fundamentally finding is exactly what you described the world created this technology that arguably will help keep everyone safer and in most parts of the world people are responding by saying no thank you i don't trust this now in some cases they're saying i don't trust it and i don't really have confidence that it's going to make that much of a difference in my life so that's all the more reason to say no thank you but the real risk is that governments will mandate its use and they'll mandate its use without the debate having put in place the kind of fundamental protections for human rights government leadership going to come on this we don't see it coming from the u.s is europe going to lead the way i think do you think of this i think on most issues of privacy protection europe has led the way i think to some degree europe led the way because it was the continent that suffered the most from the absence of privacy protection in say the 1930s and then again in you know east germany under the stasi in the three decades that followed but you know since the 1980s europe has consistently led the way now we now have privacy laws in place in more than a hundred countries around the world we're still waiting for the united states to catch up and yeah i desperately think we need more work among the world's democracies to put sort of a a blueprint together of how to protect privacy how to protect public health say but do it in a way that is really also consistent with these fundamental freedoms we have about four minutes left so i want to go back to the original question which was is democracy under threat and what i want to ask each one of you is to let us know your thoughts about what we should do in order to defend democracy but in very practical terms not just broad theoretical terms kristin okay um i actually spend a lot of time doing hackathons i love participating in them um being right there with often a very urgent need added one recently built for belarus explain to us what they are how they work for you so yeah no this is part of the part of the thing hackathons people often think that it's very techy people who know how to code and how to hack and and this is why i don't actually like the word hackathon we need to find something different and better because it's about finding solutions collaborating very quickly breaking things trying them again until you actually get to something that that works to quickly address a problem as we did after the the belarusian elections trying to find solutions using facial recognition and ai to find people that had been taken from the streets i would love to see a different word for hackathon so that we can have more of society more citizens playing parts in these because i think it's a real way of engaging with the problems that democracy threatens and it's also incredibly empowering and i would love to then see how we can take that and build that into maybe create a new iteration of davos or something like that so we've got the thinkers and the talkers and through whatever this new hackathon word is we can inject the doers and the citizens into it to really uh sort of empower citizens a lot more i think actually the organizers have found through some magical biometric uh method that the audience likes the conversation we'll keep it on for another five minutes but brad what's we doing with the defense democracy in practical terms well what i would say is two things i mean first we do need tech companies to keep pushing faster on the kinds of tools that will protect democracy and there are you know there are more steps being taken i mean you look at the election of 2020 in the united states and what you see every week is google facebook microsoft others saying this is what we've disrupted today in terms of attacks from russia china iran and elsewhere and and that's just one example of where we can and must do more but i would say at the end of the day this ultimately is about governments and that means in the world of democracy around citizens and people and yeah i do think democracy is under threat democracy is going to have to almost prove itself again in the years and decade ahead and i think if democracy dies it will die in separate silos if it flourishes as i think we clearly all want it to do it will flourish with countries doing more together we're talking about a series of global challenges whether it's a virus that respects no border or carbon that moves in the air from country to country we need people to vote for leaders who will act in a united way and bring the world's democracies together to address the problems of our time yeah but do it with an appreciation for values that were born here in many ways in athens 25 centuries ago i would ask you i mean president trump has made it very clear that he's going to question the election result if he loses he said this is not going to end well you have launched the defending democracy initiative and so on how sure are you about the integrity of the electorate system right now in the us and will you be able to defend it if things get really ugly there i think the answer is yes at the end of the day there is every reason to have confidence in our voting systems in the united states whether people vote by mail or whether they vote by person um yeah the other thing we should always remember is democracy actually always works well when it comes to voting as long as the gap between the two candidates is say two points or more and it is always extremely fragile when a race is won by just a hair you know whether it's a community election that's won by a hundred votes or a state that's won by ten thousand that's when you end up with all of these recounts and that it was true in the year 2000 in florida between al gore and george w bush it was true in many other years as well i think that is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what's going to happen now well let me just say first let's see everybody's assuming at this point that the worst case will emerge oftentimes when you assume the worst that's not bad because then you find out that the reality is better than you thought but at the end of the day look we have spent as i just say as an american here you know as a nation you know two and a half centuries strengthening the way people vote strengthening the way we count the votes there are many challenges including the fact that it is harder for some people including people of certain races to vote than others but should we have confidence in the integrity of our voting system absolutely and do we need people who say they will respect the outcome whether they win or lose that is the very essence of a democracy it is the cornerstone of american democracy and i think we should always go forward with the expectation as the electorate that of course everybody who puts their name on the ballot will respect the outcome if they didn't they should have never put their name on the ballot to begin with in terms of external powers influencing the result of things are things different now than 2016. well two things are different now one is the attacks are more varied and more sophisticated but second we actually know what's going on so people are more educated well and we're all doing more to fight these threats whether you're talking about the tech sector or the parts of the u.s government that are responsible for the nation's defense you always have to worry deeply in my view about this as well you'd never take for granted our ability to withstand these threats because they are quite sophisticated but yeah you're always the worst prepared when you don't recognize the problem that you face i think today we do you bill what we do in order to defend democracy in practical ways well on the individual level the most important thing is to join an organization uh 50 people belonging to an organization can accomplish far far more than 500 individuals working on their own so whichever cause is dearest to your heart join an organization you can accomplish far more if you're an engineer i would say two practical inventions developments i would like to see as soon as possible is first of all an antivirus for the mind the same way that we have an antivirus for our computers to defend it against hacking and so forth we need it now for the human mind again something that works for me not for microsoft not for google not for baidu but something i can buy and that gets to know me in order to protect myself against being hacked and secondly i would like engineers to work on kind of balancing the surveillance equation yes we have more surveillance of citizens we need more surveillance of the people on top at the same time so we need to build more tools to for example fight government corruption and you know the technology as you said in the beginning it's neutral you tell it to survey to monitor the citizens it monitors the citizens you tell it to monitor the presidents and ceos and so forth this is what we'll do so i would like to see more engineers working on developing tools that monitor the presidents and ceos and ministers in the service of the citizens okay tomorrow morning you have a conversation with our prime minister which is widely anticipated so what are you going to ask him i mean what is the main theme of this conversation oh i haven't thought about it yet i mean i i like to see you know what the questions give you a few ideas if you want i would like to see what the conversation i mean being leading a country is far far more complicated than writing books and the main problem is that people in those positions they're usually so busy and so uh they are so busy they don't have time to look at the big picture so i would like really to understand how the big picture looks from the viewpoint of somebody who is on the front line of actually acting okay great kirsten brad you will thank you very much for this conversation i would love to have the same conversation a year from now i think things will be very different in many ways anyway i thank you all for this lively conversation thank you thank you [Applause] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 140,706

Keywords: #athensdemocracy #yuvalnoahharari #democracy, Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Harari, Sapiens, Homo Deus, History, Humankind, Science, Philosophy, AI, Artificial intelligence, Technology, Revolution, Evolution, Algorithms, Democracy, Global, Data, Politics, Future, Present 21st century, 21 Lessons, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Thought Leaders

Id: JfyIW9wRvB4

Length: 50min 38sec (3038 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020