Yuval Noah Harari reveals the real dangers ahead | The TED Interview

[Music] welcome to the ted interview i'm chris anderson this is the podcast series where i sit down with a ted speaker and we get to dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their ted talk my guest this episode is yuval harari he's a historian and a futurist and his books have wowed so many people because of the sweeping way in which they connect our past and our future yuval thinks that humans have gotten to where we are in large part because of our ability to as he puts it create fictions to tell stories and to share those stories we can cooperate because we alone of all the animals on the planet can create and believe fictional stories a human can say look there is a god above the clouds and if you don't do what i tell you to do after you die god will punish you and send you to hell this is something only humans can do you can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after you die you'll go to chimpanzee heaven no chimpanzee will ever believe such a story yuval has a story about the future that is profound exciting but also unsettling he thinks the disillusionment that many of us feel right now is actually to a large part misconceived it's not that we shouldn't be worried but we're actually worried about the wrong things they'll lie ahead of us much deeper dangers dangers that actually could even spell the end of civilization as we know it over the next hour we'll talk about some of those dangers and about why yuval thinks we've gotten to where we are and what we can do to prepare for the coming challenges yvonne hirari welcome it's good to be here so you have this extraordinary way of connecting history with every issue that is relevant today i think and you seem to do it by the way you describe history as this history of narratives of the stories that humans have told themselves which which i think you argue is really humanity's superpower i'm curious to hear what you think of the narrative we're telling ourselves today this basically i think in your in your book 21 lessons of the 21st century you talk about a disillusionment that's happened how would you describe that narrative that we're telling ourselves today we don't have a narrative i mean we are in this quite unique and frightening situation when we don't have a story to explain to ourselves what is happening in the world and where we are heading uh in the 20th century we had three big narratives three big stories that really explained everything the past the present the future you had the fascist story which said that the whole of human history is a struggle between nations and one human group one nation one race will violently dominate the entire world and the second story was the communist story communism said no no no history is not a struggle among nations history is a struggle among classes everything that happened for thousands of years is a struggle among classes and the future the communist vision for the future was that one social system will dominate the whole world ensuring equality between all people even at the price of freedom and then the third story was the liberal story which basically said history is not a struggle between nations or between classes it's a struggle between liberty and tyranny and the liberal vision for the future was a peaceful cooperation between different groups of people with some inequality but with maximum freedom with freedom is the main thing and we can take inequalities as the inevitable price of that and you can see the 20th century is a struggle between these three stories one by one they get knocked out fascism is knocked out in the second world war then the cold war knocks out communism and at the end of the 20th century we reached the end of history when the liberal story is the only one remaining and so so we had these three stories and then two stories and then just one story there is just one story that explains everything this is the most reassuring situation and then it collapses which is what is happening over the last 10 years five years and we don't have a new big story that explains what is happening and where we are going so talk about the current disillusionment i mean what caused the blowing up of the liberal story and actually while before we go too far down the street i just want some more clarity on the liberal story because the word liberal is understood differently by other people in the uk there's a party called the liberals yeah there's it's understood differently by liberal you mean the term pretty broadly in a way that actually encompasses for example both george w bush exactly in historical terms he is a liberal most trump supporters are also liberals in the historical sense i mean i mean i know that in the us when people say liberal they have in mind gay marriage gun control abortion all these things but historically speaking it's much much broader define it oh okay maybe maybe i'll say something about the word liberal it simply comes from liberty it's the idea that liberty is the most important value in the political sphere in the economic sphere in the personal sphere so in the political sphere and from a broad historical perspective thinking in terms of centuries and not decades if you think that political power should come from the people and not from some king or from god or something like that then you're a liberal and then you have the economic field and there the idea is that people should be free to choose their professions their products what to buy what to work economic liberty if you think that people should have the freedom to choose their own professions their own careers you are an economic liberal so you have the political field the economic field and then you have the personal field so here the test is if you think that people should be free to choose whom to marry then again you're liberal this is where it gets confusing i think the term liberal a little bit for some people because people there's a lot of conservatives who would accept the first two definitions of liberal would embrace that but um perhaps until recently many of those people would not have accepted liberal guidance on on the very personal side and so yeah i mean but even if you look at the personal field i think even most hardline republicans are in favor of marrying from love and from your own personal choices and are not in favor of fixed marriages i think that most republican voters did not marry somebody who was chosing for them without their consent and participation by their parents or by the elders so when you get to something like gay marriage if my choice is to marry somebody from my own gender then some people say okay that's where the line i draw the line but compared to the situation a century ago i think that most republican voters a century ago would have been considered like extreme hippies they would have been like on the extreme liberal end of the of the spectrum so this definitely on the personal sphere there's been this massive shift of um opinion over time and um you can think of the liberal story as a broad one there's lots of detail in there but basically a version of that story com encompassing politics economics and personal yes became the winning ideology of say from 1990 or whatever onwards but um but it kind of you know after 20 years boom ran into massive problems describe what happened what are the reasons is difficult to say especially because many of the promises of kind of the liberal story were fulfilled the world is still full of problems but compared to any previous time in history according to many measurements we never had it better i mean if people think no liberalism has done a really bad job we want to go back to some prayer liberal golden age i would just like to know which year they have in mind if you think the world of the early 21st century is a bad place to live in what are you dreaming about the 1950s the 1850s are you drinking drinking about going back to the 13th century if you look at statistics about things like child mortality like uh epidemics like famine for humans not for the planet not for the ecological system but for human beings uh the early 21st century is the best time to live so as a historian almost what i hear you saying is there's almost a human psychological bug where we're widely prone to nostalgia and to actually to false stories about the past we we don't remember the bad stuff we have a tendency to focus on recent problems that hit us now and we're not really comparing like with like and and now that can be dangerous actually yeah i mean if you say if you like family values just consider going back 200 years to a situation when you have six kids and four of them die before they reach 20. if you care about family and about children would you like to live in such a world and i think most people won't but they just don't remember because they weren't alive so they don't take this into account and when i try to understand so what is the the deep reason for this disillusionment and backlash against the the liberal order so one option is that this is actually limited to largely the western core countries were in relative terms even though their situation also improved in comparison to people in in india or in china the gap has shrunk and because it was still the most powerful countries in the world especially the us when people in the u.s feel miserable the entire world shakes the world feels the pain of people in kentucky and pennsylvania far far more than it feels the pain of people in brazil or in india is that because media stories originate from the us or it's not just media you know the us is a powerful country in the world in economic terms in military terms in cultural terms so the resentment of people here translates into political and economic steps which have a huge impact on all the world whereas if you live in sudan and you are resentful there is whatever you do it it's unlikely to have such an impact on the rest of the world so if people in in sudan or people in the philippines feel pain the world usually ignores them but if people in kentucky or people in indiana feel pain the entire world uh pays attention and you have now this like people in silicon valley people in the in the top universities they are constantly thinking why are people in indiana and kentucky resentful and how much of the explanation of that is just almost the simple economic one that the world came to believe in free trade almost like a religion it was like this is the way that you maximize overall economic growth so all these trade agreements were put into a place to allow that pipes effectively were connecting the us and europe with the rest of the world and it allowed the immediate sort of outsourcing of a lot of of jobs so that um hundreds of millions of jobs were created in the developing world but they probably displaced tens of millions of jobs in europe and the us and that's and led to this sort of plateauing of income and and and hope for the future that has been ended up being quite quite destructive is that is that a core part of the narrative there i think that's part of the story that you know for two centuries britain and the united states and other western powers have pushed the entire world in the name of free trade and globalization because it worked very well for people in britain and the us and suddenly when it works well for china and india but works less well for the usa they say no no no i forgot about it all the stuff we said about free trade and globalization we don't want it anymore so that's that's part of the story but i i still think it there is something deeper than that i don't know i mean we need a lot of of research and empirical data to back up or disprove what i am about to say so take it just as an idea as a hypothesis not as kind of a of a full-fledged explanation but i think part of what is going on on maybe a deeper level of of of the human mind is that people sense a lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story even if their material conditions are still relatively good in the 20th century what was common to all the stories the liberal the fascists the communists is that the big heroes of the story were the common people not necessarily all people but if you lived say i don't know in the soviet union in the 1930s life was very grim but when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future you were there you looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in in in heroic poses and it was obvious that this is the future now when people look at the posters on the walls or listen to ted talks they hear a lot of you know these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization and and they are not there they are no longer part of the story of the future and i think that if i again this is an hypothesis if i try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world part of of what might be going there is people realize and they are correct in thinking that that the future doesn't need me you have all these smart people in california and in new york and in beijing and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bioengineering and global connectivity and whatnot and they don't need me so maybe if they are nice they will throw some crumbs my way like universal basic income but it's it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited so talk about this because this is this is one of the key ideas that you have been extremely articulate about talk about how how you see technology shifting how things work and actually realizing those fears or risking realizing those fears even more deeply than you think people feel so on on one level you know it's the economic and military realities if you go back to the middle of the 20th century and it doesn't matter if you're in the united states with roosevelt or if you're in germany with hitler or if you're in in the ussr with stalin and you think about building the future then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories in the farms the soldiers in the you need them you don't have any kind of future without them and now fast forward to to the early 21st century when we just don't need the vast majority of the population because because uh the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology like again artificial intelligence bioengineering most people don't contribute anything to that except perhaps for their data and whatever people are still doing which is useful these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people and that's obviously you know there's a lot of debate um about this some people feel that actually technologies including artificial intelligence will empower people simply to do more more interesting work i mean clearly technology can empower there's you know a radiologist who you know here's an ai that detects um patterns of cancer better than they do but perhaps they can become a sort of strategist and sort of um you know move their work to a higher level and figure out what is the wisest diseases to direct radiology into and and use these use these things as tools and therefore the work actually gets more interesting what's the the counter warning to that i agree there will be many new and exciting jobs for humans the problem is that it's not clear that many humans will be able to do them because they will require high skills and a lot of education so a lot of humans will be left behind even if there are new jobs again taking the historical perspective if you look look back at what's happening in the 1920s and 1930s so you have technology coming in and displacing a lot of people from traditional jobs in farming so you don't need a hundred farmers on this on this farm you just need two tractors and a couple of mechanics and drivers that's it so you have 90 farmers displaced but then they just move to the city they move to detroit or they move to stalingrad and start working in the tractor factory in in that way they are still part of the future but what we are talking about now with the rise of ai and machine learning and all that is that a lot of jobs will be replaced and the new jobs will demand high skills and a lot of retraining when you left your farm in i don't know minnesota and move to detroit to work in the factory it's always difficult to change your profession in your life but to learn the job of a factory hand in in this big factory in detroit you could do it at age 35 or 45 in a couple of weeks or a couple of months and you will be okay and similarly if you lose your job in the factory and you move to the supermarket it's still possible to do that without a lot of education and without a lot of free training but if you lose your job as a truck driver or as a factory worker and people come and say oh but wonderful we have all these new jobs uh engineering software in california or building virtual reality games how are you going to do that so again trying to desperately to sort of apply some sort of more hopeful spin on that and in fact you do this yourself in your book at one point um a lot of the jobs that are being displaced are actually kind of boring jobs they don't really tap into the core of what the human is they they they kind of treat humans a bit as sort of robotic things that you pay the money and and they will do the same thing again and again and you know we can aspire to more than that um so the question is is there more that you you can do and certainly you know due to the lens you talked about about existing jobs you can see them sort of um being divided up between you know technology and super skilled humans and so that's scary but but when you step back i mean there's no shortage of things that need to be done i mean apart from anything else you know the world's full of millions of lonely people right right now um people are really good at making lonely people not feel lonely if they want to and pretty much anyone can can do that you know communities are a mess pretty much anyone who lives somewhere could do in principle something to make a community better they could paint a fence or or you know do some voluntary service or whatever i i wonder to what extent we're just gonna have to completely rethink what it is to work what it is to live and and and find different stories that perhaps we all have to to start to figure out a way of taking away this sort of jobs as the central goal of an economy and and find some other language yeah already find out what a job is if we can redefine building communities or raising kids as a very important job and maybe it is the most important job of all and pay for that then many of these dystopian scenarios will not come true the question is is society willing to switch its definitions and especially pay for these things um yes i mean if if we can do that then that's a much brighter future uh so so we have the path of retraining people which cost a lot of money and effort we have the path of recognizing activities like community building and like raising families as jobs that maybe the government is paying for and that also solves a lot of the problems but for that we need a new economic and social model so i'm definitely not saying that things are hopeless there is nothing that can be done to to stop the worst case scenarios there is there are many things we can do but it's not going to be easy because we need a new economic and social model so yes so this question of who pays and how seems crucial because um in the course to this future certainly more wealth will be created but it's going to be aggregated by the companies who are using the technology you know they're losing workers and jobs making their products more profitably there's there's more wealth there but there's no agreement on on how that wealth could ever move to for example pay a mother or someone who was working in a in a community do you see any solution to that problem other than somehow government's just insisting on on greater tax distribution from from the very world traditional role of government to when the market isn't efficient enough in redistributing the the wealth then this is the job of the of the government how exactly to do that i'm not an economist so i don't know how to answer that it's basically a political question we need some political consensus around that but i would say that the biggest problem by far is not on the national level it's on the global level i think that americans will be okay and i think also that the chinese will be okay because the usa and china are leading this revolution and they will dominate the probably the economy in in the coming decades and more and more wealth will flow to the us and to china um so there's still going to be political battles within the united states about how exactly to redistribute the wealth but they have something to redistribute if you think about other countries if you look down south at mexico at honduras el salvador brazil i think this journey is far far worse i mean i can easily envision a future in which the government taxes uh the the tech giants in california to pay mothers in pennsylvania and in indiana i don't see a future when they take some of that money and send it to honduras or mexico or brazil and so the question is what will the people there do so if people now in honduras work as textile workers and truck drivers and these jobs are gone because in 20 years or 30 years it's cheaper to produce textiles in the u.s than in honduras because you cut the human element out of the equation so what will people in honduras do i mean i've heard a few tech optimists talk about the the possibility for many millions of jobs being created basically to help train the um you know the the algorithms the the artificial intelligence that we're creating like it only gets smart by by virtue of exposure to millions and millions of data points and many of those have to be input by humans so that they reflect our our insights our our knowledge or whatever but it it doesn't like it feels like that even if that is something it won't be something forever that that technology goes through a cycle like ai's get to a point where initially they they rely on machine learning and then at some point they they kind of teach each other or they just you know they learn from their own simulation even that i guess there will again there will be a lot of jobs but were i mean there will be a lot of jobs in the ai industry but i guess most of these jobs will be in california and not in honduras or mexico so it's it's not really a relevant answer it's not really a relevant solution i mean you still need the data the data points as you say to train the ai at least for some period but here the danger is that we might seem a kind of data colonization a little parallel to what we've seen with the industrial revolution i mean the model in the 19th century let's say for britain and its colonies is that you grow cotton in egypt you send the raw cotton from egypt to britain they're the really important and and profitable business of producing textiles this was the high tech of the 19th century was the textile industry so you send the raw materials of cotton from egypt to manchester you produce the shirt in manchester and then you send it back to egypt to be sold and most of the profits are of course in manchester and we might see the same thing with the data economy that you harvest data let's say in mexico you send the raw data to california it's being processed there the uh high-tech products of ai are being produced in california and then you send back the finished good to be sold in mexico and the vast majority of profits are therefore in california and the only thing that the the data colony contributes is the initial data which it has no control over and therefore it gets a very small part of the profits so there's obviously a huge amount of concern um about this right now that um data has become without any of us noticing this sort of um almost secret currency of the the modern economy and and we've been gayly accepting all these free services not realizing that we're we're giving up our our data and granting enormous power um and uh you know wealth to a few companies perhaps governments um do you recommend or see any way through this where it feels like in principle there's a mental flip that can be made it said that actually everyone in the world even if they have no money are actually a source of value from their data they have they actually are an amazing data set even if they don't have any spending habits to look at just their dna their their health their condition in principle there's enormous value that the rest of humanity could benefit from if we could figure out a way of attributing the value that we get from data back to that individual it could actually be an enormous impetus for economic growth and perhaps part of the process for not creating a useless class after all have you heard anyone talking convincingly about how that might be achieved yeah there is a lot of talk now about ownership of data and how to ensure that people not just own their data but profit from their data being used there there is talk about a data tax that part of the issue is that i mean we are used to an economy in which currency in which money dollars euros yens is the main thing that is uh being exchanged all the time but we might be moving to a world in which the main thing that is being exchanged in more and more interactions is only information so if you're thinking in terms of taxing dollars you're missing most of what is happening in the economy and it's not just okay let's try to put a dollar value on the information being transmitted again you're missing the main point don't put a dollar value in it put an information value in it and maybe we need to have an information tax which is not only a tax on information it's a tax in information you need to pay in information uh and we still don't have kind of the even the the conceptual framework to deal with such an an economy i mean you couldn't figure out by implication approximations for the for the value of people's data and if you look at a company like facebook you know it's it's something like a 55 billion dollar revenue corporation that comes from 2.3 billion users i mean in in very rough average terms it's making 25 per user so there is there is already the market is is implying certain values and what i what i wonder is is whether given the pressure on tech companies now and the sort of the growing suspicion and the risk of government action and so forth whether some of them might be persuaded or seduced into into redefining their contract with their users and actually saying you know here's the deal we know that you are bringing us huge huge value we are giving you a service and we and um so we're already giving you that but we may not be fully reflecting the value of the data you're giving us we will be more transparent about this you will have your own data account and i i feel like at some point just as people move towards bank accounts containing money at some point there's going to need to be you know people if people feel control over their data i think the whole conversation changes now we don't it's very hard to conceptualize what it means to to own and control your data we have thousands of years of experience in ownership of land so it's easy to conceptualize i own this piece of land i build a fence around it there's a gate i decide who goes in who goes out very easy to conceptualize what does it mean that i own let's say that my medical data my dna like my most private data possible my dna code it's mine okay what does it mean i mean unlike land which you have just one copy of a field it's in one place you can't move it you can't transmit it nothing with dna okay i have a printout of my dna wonderful it doesn't mean anything i mean there could be a billion copies of my dna in all kinds of clouds and and computers and whatever it can be used in so many ways which i don't understand so we we are very far from understanding what it means to own your your dna and to have reasonable models for how to allow usages that i want like access to my doctor from usages that i don't want uh so so this is one problem the other problem is that we are now in a situation where the the data of individual people is very valuable because it is used to hack the humanity and to train ai but this is not going to stay like this for long once the ai is trained and once humanity is hacked the data of individual people is going to decrease drastically and it's important because we already figured out this animal so the the next billion people we don't really need their data anymore not not as much now is the critical time and the really important thing about what's being accumulated especially in the us and in china is um the ability to hack human beings and this is worth trillions and trillions not billions so that this is an alarming phrase right the ability to hack human beings give an example of that what you're talking about in the abstract the ability to hack human beings means the ability to understand humans better than they understand themselves which means being able to predict their choices better than they can predict their choices being able to manipulate their emotions being able to make decisions for them now it should be very clear we are not talking about knowing humans perfectly that's absolutely impossible never going to happen we're just talking about the ability to know you better than you know yourself which is not so difficult because most people know very little about themselves and by the way that's not all bad right for technology to know that i mean let's say i'm feeling cranky and suddenly up on my screen it pops up a note saying hey go to the fridge and drink product x you know and you drink it and oh i feel better that's that's awesome i did not know that my problem was this particular deficiency you didn't drink enough you're dehydrated it's very simple so so i mean but part of it is good and and some of what frustrates me about the current conversation is that you know that talks about ooh the risk of you know behavioral manipulation or the rest of it is that this has been part of economic life for years like the the amount that television companies extracted per hour of user attention could be higher than facebook and google and so forth are extracting now it's not completely new nothing is ever completely new in history there are always precedents so people talk about genetic engineering well we have been breeding cows and chickens for thousands of years so what's new um there there is something new what's new i mean maybe to imagine it the bordeaux line is the skin previously almost all the information gathered on you was outside your skin where you go what you buy what you watch what you press on your tv what you press on your keyboard this is the the information that flowed but the future is about going under your skin and looking directly at what is happening in your heart in your brain what is your blood pressure which part of your brain are activated now and this can be done either with invasive technologies like electrodes implanted inside your body but more and more with external devices from a ring or a bracelet on your arm which measures biometric points of information or there are now devices that just by looking at your face from a camera they can tell what's happening to your blood pressure or your heart rate things like that and this is extremely good clues for understanding your emotional state so it can go in the direction of you know full-blown totalitarian regimes like north korea forcing every citizen in say 10 years or 20 years to wear a biometric bracelet which constantly monitors not where you go and what you say it monitors what's happening in your heart and in your brain if you walk into a room and there is a picture of kim jong un on the wall and the bracelet picks up the the signs of anger because it has access to your brain uh that's very bad news for you even george orwell's 1984 they couldn't really get into your brain there was still this sphere of of a private world and and this is about to disappear in the west the main concern now is what is known as surveillance capitalism that okay it's not a kind of dictator that that spies on your brain but you have all these corporations and maybe all these government agencies which are monitoring what's happening inside your body i mean what does it mean to live in a world when your inner reality is so completely exposed i mean i don't know what you make of the the term surveillance capitalism it strikes me as a super powerful label to denigrate this whole tendency or you know to use data for uh to create economic value if you like um the companies who are behind it i dare say would say you know what you're kind of misunderstanding it that's what it's like when it's misused but really we think of it as empowerment capitalism like in your mind what is what is the trade-off between the good potential and the evil potential of this there is enormous good potential we could provide the best healthcare in the world and the cheapest healthcare in the world for billions of people uh with this kind of technology and this is why it's so tempting if there was no no good side then it was very easy let's just not do it but there are enormous beneficial and there are also great dangers i mean it's easy to think in terms of oh you have all these evil corporations or governments which will abuse this power in order to manipulate and control people in horrible ways intellectually it's it's easy to grasp that that's that's wrong we should prevent it but the really difficult stuff is what happens if it's not abused what happens if there is a system that monitors me monitors my heart my brain all the time and is is relatively benign and is it is used to provide me not only with better healthcare but with constant guidance in life in almost every decision i make we tend for thousands of years to view life as a drama of decision making life is a journey we reach intersection after intersection we need to make decisions financial decisions romantic decisions political decisions what happens if in more and more intersections you just rely on the advice of this algorithm that knows you so well and is really a benign algorithm so it's it you know in the financial realm i need to make decisions about where to invest my money let's say but this algorithm knows me so well that when i'm about to make a wrong decision like i read something on the news i'm frightened let's sell all my portfolio and the algorithm knows oh this is a bad decision your mind is now being irrational you shouldn't do it and we learned from experience that this second brain that follows me is usually better than my organic brain so i give the bank an order if what i tell you conflicts with what this uh second brain the algorithm tells you don't do what i tell you do what the algorithm is telling you if you do what i tell you i'll sue you because i know that the algorithm is better than me so you you're on the phone with your banker and you're screaming sell my portfolio and the banker says no no no no you told us not to believe you if the algorithm says no and we believe the algorithm and maybe after two hours you come down and you say ah that's so good that the banker didn't listen to me now what happens when the same thing also repeats itself in the romantic field that you want to marry somebody and the algorithm says no that's a bad idea you should marry somebody else and we learn by experience to trust the algorithm i mean what kind of life is it when more and more of these decisions are taken by the algorithms we have no religious artistic or philosophical model for understanding such a life so talk more about this like what do you have any guidelines to suggest about the things that are precious that we must hold on to and actually must not even start the process of outsourcing to technology that's the big question one of the big problems is how do you define the goal the financial algorithm that's easy i want more money so if you define the goal in in such simple terms the algorithm knows what to do when it when you reach something like the romantic field or like what to study in university then who defines the goal now part of the problem is that who defines the goal today i mean how do i define today my romantic goals or my career goals i mean it's not that humans are doing it perfectly now and the algorithms will do much worse jobs humans are doing a terrible job now that's true so you know it goes back to the most ancient philosophical and spiritual questions of getting to know yourself of what is good what is the good life and i i say it a lot in these days that ancient philosophical questions are now becoming practical questions of engineering so if you lived in ancient greece or ancient india and you uh have this debate about what is the good life or what is a good relationship i don't know socrates and then his his fellow athenians discussing this so most people aren't involved in this discussion and they just live their life in any any way that they i mean in a haha way they survive yeah they somewhat mellow through and there is an even deeper issue here which is that self-reflection and self-exploration is just much more difficult and painful than people often imagine they think oh okay we'll have more time and technology will help us and we'll explore ourselves and this will be wonderful they imagine themselves like again in ancient athens walking with socrates and having these interesting discussions or sitting for meditation and having all these experiences of bliss and oneness with the universe and wonderful and part of the problem and part of the reason that until today most people did not embark on a serious journey of self-exploration during their life is that it's far far more complicated and painful from that you start exploring yourself you discover many things you don't like about yourself you don't have these experiences of bliss and oneness with the universe well maybe sometimes you do but most of the time you have these experiences of pain and anger and loneliness and all kinds of things that you don't want to confront they are there inside so i think we reach a point in human history when technology is forcing us to do this inner spiritual quest all we are going to pay a much higher price for not knowing ourselves than ever before and this is not going to be easy well you you strongly recommend meditation it's something that's become a huge part of your life um talk talk about that well i i meditate i do the pasta meditation which i've learned from sn goenka i meditate for two hours every day almost every day that's an amazing time investment i mean you really worthy my yearly vacation is to go on a long retreat of between say 30 days and 60 days i just came back last month from a 60 days meditation retreat give us give me one like a sense of an insight that you got during that 60 days or just something that that justified to you the value of that that time well you can't understand what's happening today in the world with the attention economy if you don't observe what's happening to your own attention every moment that like the simplest meditation instruction is just you know the simplest thing in the world just bring your attention to your breath and just feel when the breath is coming in and when the breath is going out and do that for a few minutes it's not a breath exercise you're not trying to control the breath you just try to feel to notice oh now the breath is coming in and now the breath is going out that's it and this was like when i went to my first meditation course this was the instructions on the first evening and i was absolutely shocked that i can't do it for more than 10 seconds without my attention wandering away anyone who wants to understand the debate today about the attention economy and what's happening with twitter and youtube and facebook and all that if you don't take the time to observe your own attention in in in real life in actual experience you won't understand that and to realize you know i was doing my phd in oxford i thought i was a very smart person i have full control of my life nobody can manipulate me and i couldn't focus my attention for 10 seconds on my own breath without some thought emotion memory popping up and hijacking my attention to some some some story some fantasy and it made me really i have no idea what is actually happening in my mind i've almost no control over my attention and that's kind of the beginning of the journey to what extent eval is our very language misleading here like all of our language is about you me you know it's my attention you say know thyself and we often say things like you know that's just who i am but but for me it's very helpful to think of myself as this sort of um chaotic mix of personalities ideas thoughts battling you ouch in there this is kind of like this mad you know wriggling wriggling mess of of all these different hopes and insights and thoughts and um and different situations empower different parts of me exactly um and parts of me i i don't like very much and you espouse this really powerfully in the book that part of the insight of meditation is the sort of gradual letting go of sense of self and a kind of almost a humility that there's just a lot more going on in there and our language is deceiving us a lot a lot of the time yeah language and religion and ideology deceive us they give us this idea of a unitary entity that's me and encourage us to identify with whatever thought or emotion that pops up in the mind if i think something well this is me i think this i chose to think this thought it reflects who i am if i feel some emotions the same thing it's i chose to feel that if i choose to buy something to do something all that's my free will and when you meditate and you explore what's actually happening inside you realize this is a complete illusion i have very little control usually over many of the processes inside me so let's say i sit for meditation for one hour and i want to experience this peace and tranquility i tell myself oh you came here to to meditate to relax to to experience peacefulness and oneness so just let all the thoughts go away and just focus on your breath and i do that for 10 seconds and then something pops up like i published an article and there was some other professor who criticized it and this comes in the mind and i become very angry and i i said no that's not the right time to say i want peace now let's go away and it comes back again and again and then something about the israeli election which really upsets me comes up and i lose my temp and i have all these uh dystopian scenarios about this will happen and i tell myself stop all this noise i just want some peace and at the end of the one hour i say oh this was a terrible hour of meditation i couldn't get any peace but actually it was a wonderful hour of meditation i actually observe what's happening inside and how little control i have over these things and i also observe the kind of buttons and and levers that outside forces can pull inside my mind this is how it works okay so let's let's try and connect some of the dots here um you think that where technology is going the issues that it's pushing us to contemplate means that it's essential that we know ourselves better we have to stop there if we don't know ourselves better we will not even be able to have the conversation around what do we outsource to technology and what do we absolutely not you know if we're not careful we will outsource the things that are most precious to us and one of the key conversations therefore about the future which needs to be anchored in this better sense of who we are is data yes and again connecting the dots i don't want anybody to see what i just told you i mean this experience of sitting there for one hour with all these crazy thoughts and emotions in my mind i don't want anybody to access that because i know that if somebody could access that they could manipulate me in ways which were never possible before in history and i don't want my spouse to be really able to see what's happening in my mind i don't want my neighbor because there is such a crazy world inside and my power over it is so limited that it will be very very dangerous to allow outsiders this kind of access whether a government whether a corporation whether an organization it's a it's very delicate so there's one thing that comes out in your book that i found extremely powerful and helpful which is that you point out that um even though technology is showing signs of being more intelligent than us in many ways it's not showing any sign at all of being sentient are you feeling anything um the assumption in a lot of scientific writing a lot of thought about ai is that of course those things must go together historically that's been the case but i've seen more and more deep thinkers actually so that that's not clear like if the ability to feel something was just a consequence of complex information processing then google would already be conscious probably it's got so much you know going on there so is there any scenario where we could write ourselves back into this story in quite an important way as being the only things in the universe that we know of that are actually capable of the things that matter most in the universe i.e love joy creativity the sort of that feeling of peace you talked about technology can't advise us on what are the things deepest in our hearts we should not let it we should retain control in fact make our technology in service to those things and in a sense the relationship between technology and us that it should regard sentient things as gods that have superpowers it knows nothing of no is that is that ridiculous i think that the question of sentience and consciousness is the most important question in in this regard and it's the greatest riddle in science we don't understand consciousness we don't understand sentience uh it's not just humans of course it's also other animals we don't understand the consciousness and sentience of monkeys of pigs of cows and it is the most important question we face the thing is that engineers and investors are impatient people they can't wait until we figure out this thing of consciousness so they use proxies like okay we want to improve human experience what does it mean we don't understand so let's put a proxy on it time in front of screens i mean it goes back to the idea that the customer is always right if people spend more time in front of the screen that means they are having a good experience uh mission accomplished and this is an extremely poor philosophical foundation and i think that's the biggest problem in silicon valley and in the entire technological revolution that we are seeing that the technology and the engineering is incredible and the philosophy is sometimes very childish indeed but some people listening to this will go okay you you've gone all philosophical on us and um the world can't yeah we've got some bigger things to worry about so so let's look at some of those bigger things you know thinking as a historian you said that we are currently down to sort of no stories that that old story of liberalism has been broken by the sort of disillusionment of the last couple years so what now why does it matter that we don't have a story now maybe we just muddle along for a bit what happens what are you worried about could happen the worst problem is that we are confronting uh some major global threats and we need to act on them i mean if we could have the time for you know a couple of decades of just humanity on a journey of soul-searching and who we are and where do we go from here then fine but we just don't have this luxury we don't have the time we have climate change we have the threat of nuclear war still there people forgot oh it was in the 60s no it's still today there are still nukes around a lot of them and we have this problem we've been talking a lot about of disruptive technologies artificial intelligence disrupting the job market the economy bioengineering disrupting the human body itself and we need global cooperation on all these issues if we are to solve them or to prevent the worst outcomes and without a common story we don't have global cooperation again large-scale human cooperation is built on shared stories and fictions and mythologies and and you would include as examples of that um everything from like a a religion um maybe even a local superstition through to things like the american dream or or even human rights human rights are not a biological fact they are a story we have constructed now when i say that something is a fiction or a myth or a story it doesn't mean that it's evil or that it's a lie or that it is bad uh there are good stories and bad stories i mean the way to measure to decide whether a story is good or bad is its impact in the world some stories are wonderful and some stories are terrible but isn't like i think one criticism i've occasionally heard of your work is that there's like there's a sort of breathtaking uh power in sort of connecting you know the fiction of human rights with the fiction of believing in the god gugu who is hidden behind that rock and he was going to throw thunderbolts at you and both may have served a purpose in their time but is it possible that you're not doing enough to differentiate different types of fiction that yes they may all be useful in in their moment to build cooperation but isn't it also possible that some of these stories are actually truer than others is that like if you believe in truth can't you also say that stories over time are at least capable of becoming truer or more useful so for example science like i don't want to believe that science is just another story no science isn't i mean we need to differentiate two types of power right in history you have the power over objective reality like to build bridges or cure diseases or building an atom bomb and then you have the power over humans and their subjective feelings their imagination making them believe in something now for most activities you need both let's say you want to build an atom bomb so on the one hand you need a good theory of physics if you don't understand physics well enough you will not be able to build an atom bomb and here we are not dealing with fictional stories we are dealing with more accurate or less accurate scientific theories and i i definitely believe in scientific objectivity and truth in that sense but on the other hand in order to build an atom bomb a good understanding of physics is not enough you also need people to cooperate to mine uranium and build reactors and and clean after you that all the scientists have lunch so somebody needs to clean the dishes you need people to cooperate on this and for that you need a story you will not get millions of people cooperating by telling them e equals m c square now let's build an ad no wow and the story you tell them need not be true at all it could be complete nonsense and still it would be effective in making them cooperate now still i would say there are good stories and bad stories you can tell people in that situation the measurement would be how much suffering it causes or alleviates so something therefore something like human rights which is a human construction and in one sense of fiction but as measured by an attempt to alleviate suffering is that it was a very good story a really powerful story yes not just powerful but but a very good one but it's also dangerous to confuse a story we have constructed in a particular historical setting and think that we can just apply it to any other historical period or to any other political and geographical location today in the world yvonne why is it do you think that your way of thinking about the world has resonated so powerfully in silicon valley like so many people i know who are in the tech world really view you as this sort of epic source of wisdom why do you think that i'm not sure i've heard several theories some more flattering than others about why this is the case well so here's a possible flattering one and an unflashing on the flattering one would be that you're one of the few historians who really seems to get technology and the power of it so i think they respect that but perhaps the unflattering explanation is that almost that you're letting them off the hook because you go with you know this is almost inevitable and our response to it should be to understand ourselves better and then what happens next is not clear whereas there's a lot of people out there saying wait a sec you know the world is about to be blown up by some of the technologies we're doing shouldn't you be calling for a revolution calling for you know the firewall to be erected around california or or something people are annoyed that you are being too calm in your recommendations about what we should do usually i get the criticism i'm far too pessimistic then and not that i'm calm but i i think that you you can't just stop all research and development of of technology of ai of bioengineering and even if you do it in one country other countries will not do that so i i don't think that we have the option of just saying these developments are extremely dangerous let's stop one of the things you suggest we do is to replace some of our anger at the current situation with with what you call bewilderment yeah what did you mean by that i mean that when when when you're panicking or when you're very angry you think you understand what is happening and i think it's a better place to be in if you realize wait a minute the truth is i don't really understand what is happening in the world i don't have these ready-made answers and part of the appeal of populists and authoritarian kind of father figures today is that people are frightened are confused and you have this person coming and saying i know everything just trust in me i will make everything okay and that's extremely dangerous it's difficult but i think it's important to just stay with the bewilderment and confusion not forever because we need to take action but at least for for some time i mean there's a humility in that i think isn't there like if everyone on left and right for example instead of getting more and more outraged at each other we just said actually i don't know the answer to that and um i would like to know like you could picture a shift in tone of the conversation of people trying to learn from each other instead of trying to judge each other i mean do you see any chance of that happening where actually are you on the optimism pessimism um spectrum i would try to kind of summarize my my my views like that um things today are better than ever for humanity things are still quite bad and things can get much much worse so i'm not an optimist because i think that yes things are bad and they can get much worse but i'm not a pessimist either because i think that things are better than previously in history which means that it is possible to improve the situation it's really still up to us we still have the time and the ability to to make a change and change for the better well the stories we tell ourselves is going to play a key part in that what story would you like to inject into the minds of people listening that might make a difference i would tell the listeners that there is now a race a competition to hack humanity in general and to hack you in particular and you should make the effort to stay ahead of your competitors of the big corporations the governments that are trying to hack you so you need to get to know yourself better uh because there are now these forces that are trying to hack you it's not like the old days you know philosophers have been telling people to get to know yourself better for thousands of years but in the past in the days of socrates or buddha you did not have real competition now you have competition you need to stay ahead and you know meditation is just one way to do it for other people psychological therapy works for some people out is the best way to get to know themselves for some people sports or taking a long hike whatever works for you invest in that do that because you must stay ahead of the competition if they get to know you better than you know yourself it's game over for you and if i might add evolving one thing i've learned from you is just how much narratives matter and it feels like that there's so many narratives going around today that we are telling ourselves that aren't helping humans cooperate better they're actually quite destructive um any advice for people on how to pay attention to the narratives in your mind and maybe improve those narratives to avoid that risk that goes back to the to the first suggestion of getting to know yourself better because getting to know yourself better often means getting to know the stories in your mind the stories could be personal stories about your own life and childhood and personality and whatever and they could be religious and nationalist and ideological stories and if you really take the time to get to know the stories inside yourself and what they are doing to you i think this is kind of the best inoculation against the worst stories around because the stories that harm humanity usually start by harming you that they kind of amplify turn up the volume of the angry voices in your mind in your head they turn up the volume of the fearful voices in your head and fear and anger and hatred they harm you long before they harm anybody else if you walk around all day with all these hateful and fearful voices in your mind this destroys your peace of mind long before it harms anybody else and we are living in a world where there are many people and many organizations that try to send their hand into our brain and find the the volume button and put up the volume of the hate and of the fear voices and if you can actually see it happening and what it does to you that's the best defense against these external hands that are being sent all the time into your brain into your mind well you are um what an amazing conversation thank you so much for this this time and for all your thinking about this here's hoping for i don't know a wiser future with better stories told thanks so much yvonne thank you [Music] okay that's a wrap for this episode do consider writing a brief review of the ted interview on apple itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts those reviews are influential actually and we certainly read every word this show was produced by sharon mashihi our editorial director is michelle quint production manager is roxanne high lash mix engineer david hermann and our theme music is by alison leighton brown thanks for listening on the next episode best-selling author johann hari he shares his personal experience with depression and his journey to discover both its causes and solutions it is not the trauma that destroys you it is the shame about the trauma and giving people safe places to release that shame is an antidepressant that's next time on the ted interview

Channel: TED Audio Collective

Views: 106,333

Keywords: TED Audio Collective, podcast, podcasts, TED, audio, TED Talks

Id: NnoSMMGFH4w

Length: 69min 57sec (4197 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JimCripe]

A really long, in depth interview, covering how society got to its current situation, where many are disenfranchised with the new high technology driven skilled economy that commoditizes individual's information to the point the AI technology knows the individual better than the individual, and what to do about it.