Yuval Noah Harari & Sapienship Youth Debate Current Events, Popular Films, & the Future

hi professor our high dear esteemed guest not to lose any of your precious time as an introduction i will try to ask the questions that are meant to elicit strong reactions either from the audience or from the professor i won't touch on ukraine i will i'd like to put that subject on a site because i'm feeling the airspace is already over saturated with the opinions on evolution of the conflict in ukraine maybe it will make the interview less newsworthy but you are one of the few people and i'm the avid reader of your works that i'd like to pick the brain of uh and peak behind the hill or peak around the corner what's next in the cards my first question is for me it's a pressing pressing issue and i would like to know if the change is long overdue shorter work week california is debating and will be voting on the legislation for making the work week 32 hour long france has already 35 and is debating whether to shorten it to 32. i would go even for shorter workweek what's your take on it given given automatic automation threats to jobs and such i think that it's almost impossible to make predictions about the job market because it's changing much faster than in any previous time in history it's really the first time in history we have no idea how the job market would look like in 20 years and also it's very very likely that we'll not have just a single job market all over the world will be huge differences bigger than ever before because automation will destroy a lot of jobs while creating a lot of completely new jobs that we cannot even imagine you know if you went back 20 or 30 years and you told people today that there are jobs that you told people then that today we have jobs like a blogger or a youtuber or an influencer and this is a very prestigious job i mean what is it even so part of the problem we face is that there might be extreme inequalities that some people have no skills that are required about the job market whereas others are are extremely necessary and maybe they are encouraged or have to work even more than they do today and the differences could also be you know between entire regions in the world with some countries becoming extremely powerful and rich because of the new economy and actually have a much higher demand for for jobs and and for workforce whereas other countries completely collapse and don't we deserve it's what our forefathers fought for shorter workweek the 40-hour work with was introduced in u.s in 1940 in poland it was introduced in 2003. well i ideally you know i ideally why we stick with 40 who who would like to who subscribes to the idea that the work week should be much shorter radically shorter like one third shorter who owns the on the in the audience yeah i would i would a lot of people i mean i think it depends on how you define work or how how do you find a work week i mean work that requires me to sit in that position unhealthy position behind my desk that may be zero i mean i mean the the two different reasons that people work they work in order to get what they need for subsistence food clothing shelter whatever and then they work to gain meaning a lot of people gain meaning from work now the first reason in a kind of utopian society of the future you know maybe you don't need to work at all zero uh hours of work if you have the tools to provide people with with what they need even what they they want without work a lot of jobs are not worth saving we need to protect people not jobs so from that perspective if we can reduce it to zero why not then there is the question of of finding meaning in life and and and engaging with what you do but this this is like a question about what do you mean by work is raising a family work is building a community work is uh uh in you know observing yourself and getting to know yourself better is it work earlier it was mentioned that i meditate for two hours every day this is extremely hard work nobody's paying me to do that i don't expect anybody to pay me for that but in terms of of how hard it is it's one of the hardest things i do so um much of the question of the ideal work time for humans simply depends on how what we include under the term work and still we stick with rigid 40 hours and still we stick with rigid 40 hours requirement do you ever professor harari do you ever self censor what i think what i say what i write the the origin of the question is my two sons asked me once that do you have any convictions beliefs that you wouldn't share publicly because of the fear of being cancelled the platform and i said i had i had two and say they were very eager to know what are these i won't share it do you ever self censor do you have any beliefs that you wouldn't share with us fearing being cancelled not just fearing being canceled it's much deeper than that i mean the mind is full of garbage you shouldn't share everything that's not the question professor do you ever if you heard any beliefs that you think are true but you won't share it publicly yes because i think my job as a public intellectual is not just to speak up it's also to be heard and uh to be heard you need to kind of tailor what you say for for the uh for the audience and again i think there is there is a huge huge problem with the uh what you turn council culture which is emerging and i think the biggest issue is with regard to the abolition of private space and private time that there should be a very big difference between what we say here on the stage when we should be very mindful of what we say because as public intellectuals or as political leaders or as public figures the words coming out of our mouths are like seeds that go into the mind of thousands maybe millions of people and we should be very careful what seeds we are sowing but when you are in private that should become we should completely relax to take off your god and you know i sometimes see that politicians are being hounded because of some joke they told in private now as a gay man if a politician tells a homophobic joke in private i don't care about it that's very it's fine with me as long as they don't do it in a public speech as long as their policies uh are tolerant they should have their private time to do to tell whatever again it's not a good thing but as i said the human mind is full of garbage you need to be very careful about what you do and what you say in public but you need time to let go let go of your god and you know if we if we don't give for instance politicians private time if anything they say in a private moment can be recorded and then create political scandal or whatever then what you get in the end is either a trump or a putin because either you get this kind of authentic politician who always says exactly what what he thinks which is terrible we don't need authentic politicians we need responsible politicians who think 10 times before they say something or you get this totalitarian dictator who builds this entire wall around you on a propaganda machine so that nobody can record him in in private and and and and and spread it to have a healthy democracy we need our politicians we need our authors we need our public figures to have their private time to say even stupid things i like the answer uh professor harari you most certainly remember stephen pinker's testis on the decline of violence and war this one based aged badly i'd say when you take into account russia aggressions on ukraine uh syria genocide in syria turkish mixed feelings towards human rights serbia's lust for blood i'd say do you ever do you ever feel fear that unfolding events who would refute overthrow some of your tests that you that your books contain have you changed mind on any of the things you described in your books well a couple of different questions here with regard to pinker's thesis i i still agreed with myself even today even after ukraine because i think people often misunderstand pinker and also misunderstand sometimes what i say on these things um the thesis is not that war has become impossible and completely disappeared from the world that declines yes it's a statistical issue if you say that the average height of a person is a meter 60 centimeters and somebody points out but look he's two meters yes he's two meters but average it's still one 160. so we need when a broad circle perspective the early 21st century is still the most peaceful era in human history in comparative terms but not to the 1990s i think yes of course if you take a very short perspective so 2022 is worse than but again if you pink and also me when i talk about these things we talk in terms of centuries and thousands of years uh let's say the the era after the end of the cold war let's include the 1990s in it and of course you had rwanda you had the congo you had these things also in the 1990s is still more peaceful than the 19th century the middle ages ancient times and the key point here is not to be complacent the message is not that's it there is no more war we don't need to do anything anymore it's just the opposite there are still wars still violence but less than before and it's important to recognize the improvement because if you think and a lot of people think that wars don't decline they always stay on the same level there is always the same level of violence in the world what this means is that we can't do anything about it and it also means that people like putin are not responsible because it's not them who make war it's a law of nature there is a law of nature that was erupt at a similar level in every era in history so here we have a war it's not putin's fault when you realize no actually you look at the numbers you see a relative decline not complete disappearance a relative decline in the incidence of war and violence this should make us more responsible it means that look there isn't a law of nature that maintains the same level of violence all the time humans can reduce wars so we should make even bigger effort to reduce them even further and i hope that uh uh this will be also the spirit when we now look at the terrible war in ukraine that this is a man-made war this is not a natural disaster and the lesson is we need to build better global institutions we need to protect universal values and global norms in order to keep uh the peace not to just despair of it and says that's it we are living in the jungle there is nothing we can do about it today and this influenced my question today i had i had an opportunity to discuss with the with the female from the earlier generation one issue that divides us in her opinion the earth is overpopulated so refraining from having a child is a legitimate legitimate right choice in my opinion i'm from natalie i have three children myself and i think that that uh the actual that contemporary birth rates endanger west and western uh style of life what's your take on it do should the younger people refrain from having children or should we uh in opposite it's i think it's a completely personal choice i don't like it when governments or religions or terrorists are telling people how many children to have or but if you if you won't tell it they will tell themselves oh so i have some things to say about it wait a minute so first of all you know at the time of the agricultural revolution there was something like 8 million people on the earth now there are 8 billion we don't have a shortage of people if it stays 8 billion if it goes down to 5 billion it's fine there are enough humans on earth so i'm not afraid that the human kind will disappear because there are enough people who want to have children secondly it's not a western phenomena it's a universal phenomena the birth rates in east asia are even lower they're collapsing even faster than that and we'll say collapsing they're just lower birth rates even in the muslim world in countries like iran like morocco the birth rate is as low as in in certain parts of europe so it's a universal phenomena it has universal causes like uh the liberation of women who have more control over their bodies and over how many children they want it's partly because of the improvement in health care you know a century ago about a third of children died before reaching adulthood so parents one of the reasons they wanted to have many children is because they knew if you have only two kids maybe none of them would survive ultimately i think there is a very deep philosophical existential spiritual issue about why people have children and there are two very common approaches one approach is that people have children for their own interests and purposes like they have their dreams their have their fantasies they have the baggage that they accumulated throughout their life and they want somebody to take this package and now you carry it like i have my nation i have my religion i have my party i'm going to die but somebody needs to keep carrying these things you do it so sure so so that that's uh uh that's one option the other option and that's again depends on your religious spiritual views you are not the one that creates the kid the kid comes maybe from god maybe before in previous life whatever she or he they come with their own baggage it's not your baggage you have kids because you've chosen to help somebody with their baggage not to have somebody to dump your baggage on and that's i think the fundamental question and um and personally i i can't even say that i chose not to have kids it never even occurred to me to have kids really it's like i don't know why don't you have an elephant white elephant why don't you have an elephant because it's a burden no did you ever think about having an elephant well never i mean i knew that people have kids i mean i live in the world but in in the deep sense it never really occurred to me that if i didn't know that other people have kids i would never have thought about it myself professor harari right now on a bit lighter note you don't have to answer were you a popular kid with the crowd in your school years no yeah and yeah the second question do you do you ever netflix and chill do you do you do you live life do you live life of an industrious monk that is dedicated to his work or do you ever chill what do you do if you want to be industrious you also have to chill i mean it goes together if you work yourself to death you don't accomplish what do you do then so first of all i do watch a lot of series netflix yes also others other hbo whatever um so i'm glad to hear yeah i play with friends a lot i go hiking i do all kinds of things what was your darkest hour i mean the work-wise or work-wise i mean do you ever doubt doubted your work or wanted to change the line of work or not you were always dedicated and straight straight like an arrow because yeah young people doubt themselves uh with regard to work i mean i i i was extremely lucky i think in my life that most of the time i did what i fancied i did what i liked so you are blessed yeah and i know it's very rare it's not something that you can recommend to people oh you should do like that because it's it demands really um it's a privilege and and and very often people just don't get this privilege so i i hope that i i'm really grateful that it worked for me and i realize it's it's it's not the case lots many many people just don't get the opportunity right now the longer question imagine you became the president or the prime minister of slightly peripheral country with 38 million population well a duke well educated ambitious resilient with hint of inferiority complex modernized but still lagging behind leading countries of the west you were elected because of the promise of accelerating economic growth catching up to the first-year countries and raising length of life what would be your first move as prime minister i'm a very bad politician i mean the the really best move should be to resign and give the job to somebody who understands politics um not an option not an option i mean the first thing i do is i would end the culture war i know that i i i imagine it's beyond your powers yeah so you give me a lot of power and then they take it away i mean but i i think one of the biggest maybe the biggest problem internally you know leaving aside all the global problems of the world climate change and so forth for many of the countries in the west whether it's poland whether in the united states whether it's france it's britain i mean i look at them and i think their biggest problem is is really it's not economic it's the internal culture war that society is tearing itself apart you know i mean in in from many uh perspectives it's the best time ever lots of problems yes but economically socially in terms of health care services welfare services it was never better than now and yes you see so much anger and bitterness and sometimes hatred in many countries people hate their fellow citizens or fear their fellow citizens more than they hate or fear anybody else on the planet i promise i won't touch on ukraine but to this question so do do you think that the national unity in ukraine and the support for president zelansky will dissolve in time or will they stay united well i mean i i hope and i i think there are good reasons to believe that they will stay united it doesn't mean that you will continue to have the same approval rates usually not in times of war but in normal times when a leader has phenomenal approval rates it's usually a very bad sign yeah in in real democracies liberal democracies if you have an approval rate of 50 percent 55 percent that's a very big achievement if you have a 90 approval rate and it's not existential war you are living in a totalitarian dictatorship longevity is one of the subjects you touched on in your books extensively has the in your opinion has the progress stalled or have you or have you stayed on optimistic on the outlook of radically prolonging human life have your the the it's the question about the time horizons because we probably we both stay optimistic about the longevity technology but i'm not sure i was ever optimistic about it in the sense i think it's coming i'm not necessarily convinced it's a good thing because my main fear is that it could be a privilege of a very few people and it will create immense divisions in society so yes i think that we will have not in the next five or ten years but in the next 50 or 100 years we will have technologies to radically extend human life and this is something that i'm i'm i'm quite pessimistic about because there is a big danger it will be expensive and available only to a small portion of humanity and it will create a a very sharp and a bigger divide in in human society than ever before you know in any previous human society at least one thing was always equal and this is death the emperors the sultans the kings at least they also died to live in a society when most people or the poor people continue to grow old and die but a small elite uh stays young and lives indefinitely this is a terrible scenario for humankind for a lot of reasons politically ethically socially okay i bet to differ but it's a longer debate oh okay i think it will be a commodity technology at one point so we all will be blessed with the longevity that's a different story i don't know if i will be long live live long enough to to benefit from it but still i think like every technology it will the cost will go to almost zero the question is how long it will take usually with technologies the problem is not the end point it's the transition period the transition period is a period of upheavals and uh the the the more radical the technology the greater the upheaval of the transition period so that's the big danger do you still hold strong conviction that dataism is the answer to human challenges do you subscribe to david brooks who invented the term believe that growing body body of evidence science research and big data will reduce populations cognitive biases given last few years and the growing opposition to experts science research basins fascinations and such you you again i'm not i i was never optimistic about it because i'm not convinced it's a good thing looking at the span of human history one thing is very very clear information isn't truth growth in information is not growth in truth fake news of information conspiracy theories of information lies as information propaganda is information very efficient information systems can also be very efficient repressive systems it's not yes you can use a sophisticated information system information network to discover the truth but you can also use it to impose a lie and we saw it many many times in history that uh uh very efficient information systems they are just very good at imposing lies so yes i think we will see a huge increase in the power of information technology and in the speed and efficiency of the flow of information but we should be extremely careful about it but not the reduction of cognitive biases it depends what we do with it you can use the new information technology to reduce cognitive bias for instance you can use it to be more aware of your own biases which is one of the most difficult thing for humans is to be aware of my own bias to know myself and now we have technology that can tell us much more accurately than ever before what our biases are even people who think that they are not racist even people who think that they are not homophobic we now have technological tests that you can really see the level of your racism or the level of your misogyny or whatever but that's a choice of what you do with these technologies coming back to longevity how do you treat your body to prolong life do you do you put any effort in prolonging the length and the quality of life do you refrain from red meat from alcohol alcohol um i do all kinds of things but not in order to prolong my life the main reasons are are first of all ethical i've refrained from eating meat not because i think it will prolong my life but because it prolongs the life of the chickens and the cows whatever and i refrain from drinking alcohol or using other drugs because i work very hard to kind of clarify my mind and these substances work mostly by kind of obscuring the mind of of clouding the mind so it's like doing a step forward a step back so i'm not sure if if not drinking alcohol will prolong my life but i think it will make it a better life we say that the western countries are hedonistic consumerist societies that we invented hundreds of ways to enjoy our lives but still there is a new plaque depression a apathy gloom and hedonia is it a plug is it a contagion what's the transmission mechanism me as a parent i want to know what's your take on it what's the transmission mechanism what are the roots of the growing problem of mental challenges and depression i'm not sure if if western modern society is more depressed than previous societies but certainly didn't find the kind of secret of happiness humans are very good in acquiring more power through scientific research technological invention organizational reforms that they are very good in acquiring over diagnosed or where we under diagnosed previously we were under diagnosed and now over diagnosed i'm not sure if over i mean it's there are serious problems but it's not like life in the middle ages everybody was dancing from joy all the time and then modernity came and everybody became kind of depressed it's um it wasn't fun to live in the middle ages there were fun moments of course but generally speaking it wasn't like a fun period or maybe like like uh thought leader jordan peterson advises the young people should grow balls and to toughen up um you know the vikings are very tough i'm not sure they're very happy people you can say a lot of things about them though again the impression from reading the sagas and from their ecological evidence they don't i wouldn't bet that vikings a thousand years ago were happier than swedes and danes are today do you oppose or or are pro eugenics at conception or in warmth how was your take on it did you find people use the term i mean i i mean for example changing the gene makeup to make people make people [Music] more intelligent brighter at present i'm very much against it because i think we don't understand humans well enough to start messing up uh you don't know you i mean most human there are exceptions but most human qualities they are determined not by a single gene but by a combination of many genes each gene also responsible for other things so you don't know maybe you tweak the gene for intelligence and it also uh causes people to be less compassionate maybe you tweak the gene for depression and it also makes people less spiritual so until we have a better understanding of humanity i would say that the the agenda of research should not be to kind of re-engineer humans it should be to understand them and to help them make the most of what they have to take like a a think that you you you go to the supermarket to buy new stuff first of all look in your refrigerator maybe you don't need new stuff maybe what's in there is enough so it's the same with the human before we rush to have four hands or to enlarge the brain or whatever we don't really know what we have let's first of all find out what our real potential is and how to uh maximize it and then if we discover that we lack something essential okay let's talk about about upgrades would you prohibit it at present um again with certain exceptions you know like with severe diseases that we really understand the genetic mechanisms behind then yes so would you refuse to parents that their children are bright like the people who that are gathered here well that's a hard question would i refuse yeah would you refuse to parents that opportunity i don't think that we can kind of engineer bright people simply by changing the genetic code it's uh you know with the same genetic code somebody can grow up to be a saint or a monster so it's it's it's it's and again the the connection between the genetic code and the on and your characteristic at age 20 and 40 is so complicated so yes i do want of course to have a a bright and and compassionate a new new generation i'm just not sure that uh tweaking with dna is is the best way to get there you you emphasize uh this issue how can we believe belief experts we are taught about the dangers of do your own research and that we should defend the institutions defend defend the experts but still time to time we discover that the expert and the institutions lie to us manipulate like this this this week jp morgan one of the most renowned and respected banks that wanted to uh wanted to retract that they that they called china uninvested uninvestable because they were afraid they will lose the business in china and how can we how can we trust the institutions if the institution cheat on us first of all it should be clear you can't research everything yourself yeah even as a historian most of what i know about history i can't just go myself and do every archaeological excavation in the world impossible so this is ridiculous to tell people go and research do your your own research on everything we have to trust institutions the question then is which institutions to trust not all of them are equally trustworthy so the best yardstick that i know of is self-correction mechanisms a good institution is an institution that first of all is aware that it itself can make mistakes and has a strong self-correcting mechanism and when a mistake is discovered uh it acknowledges it acknowledges it and sometimes even celebrates it science in general is is is such an institution you know you can't will nobel prize by just repeating what people before you said you must discover something that somebody said wrong or didn't know in order to build win nobel prize so science is like the extreme case of an institution built around a self-correcting mechanism then you have the opposite extreme for instance uh religious institutions that i don't know like that the pope is supposed to be infallible they can never make any mistakes that's the opposite and you know the catholic church it apologized sometimes for for for for mistakes and crimes in the past but never as an institution it usually says that no the the church can never make a mistake but individual priests uh individual bishops yes they can make mistakes this i find problematic an institution should be able to humbly and honestly acknowledge that as an institution we did something wrong you know i mean the the uh things like the crusades like the inquisition they were not the initiative of some wayward priest so honestly the church said yes we made a mistake and in the same way that you know the department of biology and university most biologists would acknowledge that the discipline of biology was tainted by very severe racism for a very long period from the 19th century much of the 20th century the discipline of biology was racist and propagated racist view this was not the fault of a particular professor who was biased as an institution they made an institutional mistake and one of the reasons that i trust scientific institutions is because yes they make mistakes but when they do they have their not always but at least sometimes the humility and the honesty to take responsibility as an institution and it's the same you know with with governments uh there was this meeting between the uh the foreign ministers of china and the us in in alaska a couple of uh two years ago and the the chinese ministered uh a long list of all the crimes that the us did in its history and the uh u.s foreign minister said yes we did crimes but unlike you we acknowledge them we can come and say yes it was a mistake uh uh a huge crime slavery is a huge crime this this war here on this invasion there it was a huge crime wait until you get the chinese to recognize something similar you'll have to wait a long time yeah but continue continuing lab victory do you know what it is the theory about the origins of covet of coronavirus oh i heard many theories about it yeah but it was it starts with the humbling experience for myself i switched the opinion a few times first i thought that this is one of the few one of the far-right conspiracy tourists and i even ridiculed people myself now it's it's but then i've seen the the laboratory that the the origins of virus coronavirus are man-made not planted but it was a leak from the lap in wuhan then we've heard that it's it was from the from the animal from the baths or like this and then i've seen the strong evidence uh prohibits or pro prodi la plick theory and i and and i felt humbled because how regular people should should navigate this jungle of conflicting data information we talk about the misinformation disinformation and and i i felt myself i'm i'm quite upped uh at it and then still i felt the victim and still to these days i don't know what's the truth yeah how to raise our skill set discerning the true from the first of all to realize that about many things we don't know as individuals we just don't know and again i would trust institutions because it's the yes they make mistakes but it's the best thing we have in this case scientific institutions i'm not an expert on epidemiology i don't understand viruses i can't tell the difference between a virus which is man-made and a virus which is uh evolved by by natural selection the truth to truth has strong implications for the future it has immense implications but there are many things we don't know um so if if i'm not sure then just acknowledge that so the the advice would be proceed with caution when the new information comes in don't rush to adopt a kind of a very strong view wait i mean first of all again in such a complicated issue we don't have a choice but to follow the experts yes the expert can manipulate us but what's the alternative i mean viruses are such a complicated thing a virus is not even an animal it's just a biological code it doesn't eat it doesn't reproduce by itself it's not like a tiny ant or a tiny tiger it's something completely alien it has the ability this code to infiltrate our cells hijack the mechanisms of the cells and make the cell produce more copies of this code we then spread to other cells and goes viral now this is such a difficult thing for humans to understand because we never encountered these things directly in evolution our minds evolved to understand things like tigers like mice like ants which we can actually see which function in a familiar way because they are animals like us so i don't really understand virology just as i don't understand quantum mechanics you know how do i know i don't know like the iranian nuclear program i don't understand nuclear physics so i trust what the nuclear physicists are telling me about nuclear weapons if there is a worldwide conspiracy of nuclear physicists to lie to all of us about nuclear weapons then what can we do but i don't see that the kind you know what's the incentive behind it very often with conspiracy theories the question to ask is what the what is the incentive you know to take something from a very different area like lots of people believe you know that the ancient pyramids will be built by aliens and there is some secret technology hidden there and the egyptologists the experts on ancient egypt they have a conspiracy to hide it from the public and i never understand what could be their motivation i mean i know these people some of my best friends are egyptologists and you know these people are so kind of frustrated because almost almost nobody goes to study egyptology at university they don't get any budgets because people think it's not important now imagine what would happen if it turns out that the pyramids were built by aliens and there is some very powerful weapon hidden inside immediately you will have thousands of students coming to egyptology and you have billions of dollars from the government to egyptology so they have every incentive in the world to convince the public that yes the pyramids were built by aliens give us money now and they don't do it they honestly say nah there are a lot of slaves who hold bricks for years and build the pyramids so i trust them coming back to the to netflix most of us have seen don't look up the movie i saw it also imagine this scenario the asteroid is coming for earth it seems we are doomed and until someone invents the solution to the to the problem whom do you believe the president who will save us president nasa or elon musk jeff bezos i would go with the president with your money on the president i mean again it's it's it's because um it's not a job of private entrepreneurs to make these huge decisions they were not elected by anybody they don't represent anybody okay they're very smart people they made a lot of money but they who says that the interest of the public is really what guides them of course also is the president who says but a president at least was voted was elected by a large part of the public so there is a greater chance that the president would represent the interest of the public than a a billionaire and again each whatever the crisis is asteroid climate change the facts should be is the responsibility of the scientists to provide them but the decision what to do is not just about the facts it's also about weighing different interests and this is the job of politicians not the job of scientists yeah so would you agree professor harari that this was the harmful movie because it sued the distrust in in governments that was my view because most people were enchanted with the idea that these are these honest people that fight the government even though if you look at the movie carefully the first plan to destroy the asteroid it was aborted in the last minute because of the intervention of this private entrepreneur billionaire so again it was never clarified whether the the plan would work or not but the impression is that the first plan which was cobbled together by the government and nasa it would actually have saved humanity and then it was the intervention of a of a private uh entrepreneur billionaire that ruined everything so you can read it as a a call trust the government and don't allow private businesses to have too much influence on the government last question on my side and we will ask the audience who is the most important philosopher and thought leader from europe you you read contemporary or not but rather contemporary um oh i'm not a good judge of these things i can tell you who influences me yeah exactly uh so one very big influence on me from a european uh thinker is franz deval who is not you know a philosopher per se he is a primatologist he studies apes and other animals mainly apes but at least on my thought he had enormous uh influence and i think that you know the the the borderline between scientists and philosophers it can be quite hazy yeah any female influences um let me think um elaine susan zontac marker elaine scary had a very big influence on my thinking when i was in university and then many things that i write and say today i thought hey actually i i read it in in her book like the body in pain had a very very deep influence on me lately it's roshan azubov with her writing on surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence and all that she had a big influence on me okay now to the questions from the audience the first quest question is from jasmina kazenko or yashmina kasenko would you like me to read it or you will do it yourself please from heinrich china university at dusseldorf yes that's correct thank you professor organizers fellow guests um i'm miss nakasenko i'm an academic teacher and the researcher and co-founder of an educational development foundation recently my question is about the future of leadership because our generation is well let's not get ourselves facing a lot of troubles of a lot of them you mentioned in your books a lot of them were mentioned already my question is what kind of challenges do you envision for the emergent leaders in the fields of political uh and economic leadership and how should we prepare for them thank you very much so we definitely need good leaders especially in in in politics and two problems that i now see which were not always there is that people have a very low opinion of politicians you have this kind of widespread feeling oh they are all liars and they are all corrupt and they are all crooked and this is very very dangerous people then turn expect leadership from other places from entrepreneurs from scientists and they can't do that as a scientist as a thinker i know i can't replace politicians it's a very bad idea to try and replace politicians by scientists scientists are not good at politics so this is this is a job to be a politician you need special skills for that and it's wrong to think that all politicians are corrupt or they all lie or whatever this is what the bad politicians want you to think because this kind of excuses them if i lie as a politician i say okay everybody lies no not everybody lies you lie so we need to have a kind of better uh to have a more positive attitude it's a very very hard profession it becomes harder and the second reason it becomes harder is what we just discussed earlier that in today's world politicians at least in democratic countries they are denied a private life and this is extremely dangerous uh first of all because then very few good people want to be politicians because part of the price you have to pay is that you don't have a private life who wants that uh only some very specific characters want that and that's dangerous and secondly it you need to relax sometime it's becoming also for politicians harder and harder to to relax because they are constantly connected there is the new cycle is 24 hours and um it's you know again um the mind of the politician pro creates things that then changes the lives of millions and they need some peace of mind it's very dangerous for a society when its political leaders don't get any chance to kind of decompress and kind of just sit there and do nothing and just relax a bit so uh uh i would encourage people if they have the the quality uh to go into politics and i would encourage society to give them a bit of a break hugo dudeka university of warsaw hugo come to the stage hi how are you so my name is hugo dutka and i'm the chief technology officer of a startup that creates products which do not require users to trust them our code is public and users can verify that the code that they see is the code that they that handles their data and uh my question is related to that our society our financial and legal systems are based upon trust trust to the justice trust to the banks even tries to leak out to facilities which store our legal documents so they do not alter lose or destroy them and i'm curious if you if you think that introducing and building such trustless solutions is important or not and uh if you see any dangers uh in introducing such solutions oh it's a good question let me think about it for a minute um basically this is the question about the blockchain yes okay so in general i would say that trust is the most important commodity in any society because this is what society is built on um money in in essence is trust and not just money but again any institution any large-scale system is built on on trust throughout history people always dreamt about a technology i mean the problem is trust is that many people are not trustworthy that people make mistakes people are corrupt people are fallible so throughout history not just today humans always dreamt about kind of pushing humans aside and finding a perfect technology that we can trust instead of the humans until today it never worked until today every time humans tried to do it in the end they had to create a human institution to manage the infallible technology so to give a historical example uh think about holy books like the bible previously religions were based on trusting in humans you had the priests you had the prophets and they told you what god wanted but then people said hey wait a minute how do we know that the prophet is telling the truth how do we know that the priest is telling the truth they are humans maybe they are lying to us maybe they made a mistake so they came up with the original blockchain the original blockchain is the bible it's based on the same principle you have uh you reach a consensus among many users about a certain block of code and then you seal it and you make many copies of it and then this means that you cannot falsify it if i change something in my bible you take out your bible no no no you see it's written like this and people thought that's it we got rid of these valuable humans we now have the word of god and nobody can change it and we have trust but very very quickly they discovered it doesn't work like that because different people read the same words and interpreted them in a completely different way so jesus says love your enemies and the church says aha inquisition we should burn this is what he means we should burn heretics we should go on crusades and other people said no no no and it turned out that you need a human institution to interpret the infallible technology of the holy book and i don't know how it will be in the future but at least in 2022 every technology still needs a human institution to regulate it um and it's it's not it doesn't mean we shouldn't develop new technology it's good i mean many technologies are extremely helpful to humanity but we should we shouldn't think that there is this perfect technology that if we just invent it that's it everything is solved i mean you might i know that you didn't refer specific to blockchain but again it's probably on many people's mind blockchain so you know one problem with blockchain is that if 51 of users for instance are controlled by a government and we have examples like in china when there are blockchain networks controlled by a government then it's it it really becomes an extreme it's the extreme opposite you can't trust anything in that network because you know when the communists in in private generations they wanted to kind of change the past they had to go to the archives and delete pictures from the archives and whatever now if all the archives are on blockchain and they control 51 or 60 of the users it becomes so easy to change the past so i'm not against blockchain or or any future technology i'm just saying that at present uh we'll always still need human institutions to to regulate uh whatever technology it is i i i'm feeling i stole your question but still i would like you i would i would like you to ask this question once more yes uh professor harari my name is pisarska i'm a graduate student at university of warsaw as uh as as it was said i would love to elaborate you to elaborate more on on one of the questions here as i'm 26 i'm approaching the upper limit allowing me to be here today with you it's becoming a more and more immediate and personal question for me having children not having children will be there any point of time any hint any situation that should indicate me that it is safe just wise to have children and that the planet will be a friendly and nice place to live beyond 2050 or should i just protect my children from suffering from fighting for water by not bringing them bringing them to to this planet please tell me okay this time well yeah i i i don't know the responsibility to make any such decisions no no it's it's not it's not an offer like so i i would say two two things um we we know that kids discussion are very emotional and yes yes they are very immediate so first of all it was always like this in any point in history people who have kids they don't know what kind of world they are bringing them into could always be terrible wars epidemics famines so this was always a a question for for any prospective parents um the the other point is is just what i said earlier that i would say that the key is whether people decide to have kids for their own interests like i know you know extreme cases that people have i don't know a a a marital crisis with their spouse and they think to solve the crisis by having kids so we have something together that's a bad idea i mean if you have kids do it for the kids not for you not for uh your religion your nation not to take your baggage and put it on the kids and and then again it becomes a very i think personal and deep spiritual question your perspective on on life and how is life created and where is it coming from and this is something that i i think that people should really look deep into themselves and not expect the answers from any guru or any outside authority on that so it looks like we are we are yeah left with very big questions here but thank you very much but i i would say one more thing about again the the i wouldn't if you reach the conclusion with yourself that you want it and you want it for the right reasons for for the kids and not for you not for somebody else then the worries about what will happen in the world outside it's climate change there is again you don't know what the future is going to be like and it was always like this there wasn't a single moment in human history that humans could look forward for the next 50 years or 100 years and say yes it's going to be a perfect world i'm completely certain that if i have kids they will have a perfect world to live in thomas bajos from the university of oxford hey no thank you for the talk thank you for very inspirational themes mentioned thoughts i'm an oxford alumnus like you as i presume and my question is um judging on the current state of europe and its disintegrity which which we see despite the conflict in ukraine and some kind of unification what trends do you see for europe in the future will it come back to some common narrative like it used to be with christianity will it be every nation for itself or will it be like united states both politically and ethnically what do you think will happen thank you well i i i often get these questions about the predictions for the future i'm not very good at it i can i can kind of map different scenarios but it's impossible to predict which of them will actually come true because it depends on the decisions people take if you ask me this question let's say four months ago then i would be more pessimistic than i am today i think that the war in ukraine has reminded people in europe how important is european unity that so much is at stake first of all for themselves but also for the entire world that uh europe stands together and stands united again not just to protect itself but also to protect the its common values and yes europeans kind of tend to forget that they have common values until you see a bully like putin and how it behaves and then you remember actually despite all our disagreements and arguments and then whatever actually we do have a lot of common values so um i i really hope that maybe one good thing that could come out of this terrible war is a greater european unity and i also refer to it in answer to one of your questions that the key to that would be to end the culture war uh within europe that to realize that liberals and conservatives and right wings and left wings yes they have the disagreements but overall they agree on so much much of the culture war is fueled by politicians who take certain uh inflammatory issues and really weaponize them in order to gain political votes and you can end that today many of the kind of burning issues if you approach them in a spirit of uh of of of kind of open-mindedness and and compassion um you would be surprised that it's not so difficult to reach a consensus with the opposite side but if you want to weaponize them in order to kind of electrify your base and win the elections then this is the road to to greater and greater division i mean as historian often struck by how again and again in history people find themselves getting into terrible conflicts over things that look to them important at the moment and then after a few generations people look back and they just can't understand how was it possible to fight over something like that again taking a an example from religious history you go back to europe in the 16th 17th century and europeans are killing each other by the millions over the conflict between protestants and catholics and this conflict didn't end when they finally found the answer who is right about the trinity or who is right about transubstantiation and communion and all that finally people just stopped caring about it i mean you look at a place like germany that it tore itself apart in the 30 years war and about a third of the population of germany died in the 30 years war and today i mean is he his troops or his angel america either chris our other catholic or the protestant it's just not so important anymore and you look back and you just don't understand do they really have to kill each other by the million over that so it's easy to see it when you look at previous eras i hope we can get some kind of similar perspective on on on what's happening in the present this is of course much more difficult katajina kroshka please come to the stage from boleswaff pros high school in warsaw high school thank you i'm kasia kroshka from high school and i'm interested in media so my question is as a book writer speaker and press interviewee both in written and video form what is in your opinion currently the most important and efficient way of sharing knowledge thank you oh actually i think that's a a question for my husband not not for me uh he's i mean i know how to write books and give interviews but kind of the big decisions about who to sign a contract with and which kind of of of social accounts to have and things like that he's making these decisions he's kind of the media genius in in the family so you know i'm very traditional i believe in books this is what what i know how to write um but the thing is it's developing at such a fast pace that uh what was true three years ago is no longer the case today and who knows what will be the situation in three or four years so i guess the most important thing is flexibility that it's not like you find an answer and that's it you read kind of the map right now and and this is the way to to spread knowledge most effectively and maybe in three years in five years it will be different so how to keep a flexible approach that's the biggest problem michael vermkowski from the university of pennsylvania thank you for an amazing talk professor harari i will have a question on homo dias and depends how you view it but also philosophy of history so controversial individuals in the likes of elon musk or jeff bezos are pretty much in the avant-garde of global global change sponsoring initiatives like neuralink or space exploration and they really centrifuge the description of the great men of history who for the good or bad drive us or push us forward and to the unknown so do you think that it is like did these men actually drive history or that there are just some trends underpinning forces of history uh like class warfare and like classical marxism that actually push us forward and should we do anything to constrain these individuals i think it's a combination of both i mean um if elon musk lived in a hunter-gatherer tribe uh 20 000 years ago so obviously couldn't do these things so he's what enables him to do what he does is the action of millions of people over thousands of years who created certain conditions but then once the conditions are there individuals have agency and powerful individuals have a lot of agency if you go back to the war in ukraine then in the end it was putin's decision and and and this is an extreme case of how much power and influence a single individual can have on history this war can now lead to generations of hatred between ukrainians and russians even if it ends it will leave such a devastating legacy behind and it all started with the decision of one person nobody forced him to to start this war but still you can say but how did he reach a situation when he had so much power this was not his decision this was processes in russian society and russian politics over several decades that led to the point when putin had so much power so you have this mixture and it's the same with elon musk and it's it's it's the same with every uh big leader that they they don't create the conditions that give them power but when the power is in their hands then they can have a huge influence on the direction of history maria schuster from science po in paris thank you so much hello i'm maria schuster from sean's pond paris and professor i was wondering about the role of china in the world china is of course a totalitarian country that constantly like does not exactly um does not exactly respect all the values that we cherish in the west like democracy and human rights but simultaneously we do need china in order to combat climate crisis so do you think professor that potentially we can um we can accept chinese behavior on the front of human rights and democracy in order for cooperation in combating climate change thank you that's a very important question i think we should differentiate between to some extent between between how governments and countries behave internally and externally um there are simply realistic limits to how much you can intervene or you should intervene in the internal affairs of another country no matter how bad you think they are it's simply any any possibility the question is how these countries behave on the international arena and here for example we see so far i don't know what will happen tomorrow or next year but so far there is a big difference between china and russia for example that russia has been waging one external war after the other invading one country after the other whereas china since 1979 has not engaged in any a foreign adventure directly not not by military force as long as china uh respects the basic international norms i think there is there should be room for cooperating with it on issues like climate change especially because without chinese cooperation we don't get very far and um again i don't know what will happen but um for humankind to have a positive future we need cooperation between china and the west there are there could be scenarios when this cooperation just becomes impossible and that's the reality and this will be very bad news and we'll have to handle it some somehow but until we reach that point we should keep the hope that uh some kind of cooperation at least on common problems like climate change or like this disruptive technologies is is is possible thank you so much michael stankevich university of oxford thank you professor i think that maybe despite the mr bransky's promise the atmosphere is still quite ukraine heavy and very rightfully so but maybe not to lose focus from other existential threats to humanity i would ask you what is maybe some particular some particular disruptive technology that you find both exciting and you're worried about that emerged in recent years um [Music] so the biggest immediate threat i think comes from the combination of artificial intelligence with surveillance technology because this is a potential recipe for the worst totalitarian regimes in human history until today totalitarianism was limited by uh the lack of of the necessary technology if you think about poland during the communist dictatorship or you think about the soviet union the regime couldn't really completely eliminate private life it couldn't follow every single citizen 24 hours a day and know what each person is doing and saying uh because of of of of or you know limitations practical limitations if you have 200 million people in the soviet union and you need a kgb agent to follow each one of them so you need 200 million agents but then of course even a kgb agent needs to rest sometime so you need two shifts so you need 400 million kgb agents and then somebody needs to follow the kgb agents because they could also be a threat to the regime so you need 8 million 800 million agents to follow the 400 it's impossible and even even if you get people just spy on each other which was a common practice also still at the end of the day let's say that i spy on my husband and my husband spies on me and at the end of the day we are both informers of the stasi or of the kgb and at the end of the day we write a report he did this he said that and we send it to moscow and then in moscow they get 200 million papers every day that somebody needs to read and analyze and that's impossible who can do that so it was physically technically impossible to create a total surveillance regime now it's becoming feasible you don't need human agents to follow people you have uh digital agents and we even pay for them with our own money and they loyally take them with us everywhere we go and they follow us and it takes much faster for them to send the report and it's not like you get tons and mountain of paper in some headquarters that some poor human analyst now needs to go over you have digital algorithms that can analyze this information and find patterns we are not there yet there are still limitations to the ability of the system but we are close to the point when it will become technically possible to follow everybody all the time the dream of every totalitarian regime in history now it doesn't have to be like that we can prevent it from happening by taking uh uh by making the right regulations taking the right precautions surveillance can be good like if i have medical surveillance this can be the basis for the best health care system in history which warns me about diseases and problems before they they become worse so it can develop in a positive direction but we need to be careful i would give like three basic guidelines how to how to direct it in a good in a good way first of all if you collect information on me this information should be used to help me and not manipulate me this would be obvious we already have it in many fields like again in healthcare i give a lot of very private information about me to my personal physician she doesn't then use it to manipulate me or to sell it to a third party to manipulate me she has a fiduciary duty towards me to use the information only for my benefit only to help me so we should have it as a general rule the second principle is that you should never allow all the information to be concentrated in one place whether it's a corporation whether it's a government agency this is the high road to dictatorship you need to keep the information separate between different organizations different silos and thirdly whenever you increase top down surveillance you must simultaneously increase bottom-up surveillance so okay the government or b corporation knows more about me simultaneously i should be able to know more about them whether they pay their taxes whether they there is government corruption so what if if surveillance increases generally but it increases both ways the government knows more about the citizens but the citizens also know more about the government then there is balance and then uh we are not on the road to a totalitarian regime we squeezed all the questions from the audience i had in my notebook so the we have a time for the one last question and you have a very strong opinion on the issue that polarized poland polarizes to this day as i if i understand correctly your opinion is that the anti-immigration is a legitimate political stance as legitimate as being pro-immigrant yes please uh explain yourself again we need to differentiate between immigrants and you know war refugees if you live in a country and the regime tries to kill you and your only way out is to escape to the neighboring country that neighboring country has a moral responsibility to accept you but immigration is a different matter people don't just have a universal right to immigrate anywhere they want at any moment it's a question of the host country to what extent it wants to receive these people and under what conditions now and this is an ethical question for each person with himself so you know there are christian teachings about this there are islamic teachings about this there are secular teachings about this people have different views ultimately it shouldn't be seen as a clash between good and evil exactly it should be a democratic discussion you know i hope that people will be more tolerant and more accepting at the same time understanding that you cannot accept the country to kind of just open its gates completely anybody wants to come from anywhere under what condition would accept everyone this this is this is not workable but still i i would like to see countries that have more compassionate policies uh but ultimately if the population doesn't want it then if it's a democracy you can't force them and the only place where i would say that no there is a kind of moral obligation to open the door uh wide is when these are refugees escaping death which is a hazy distinction like all these things what we as a country experience few months ago when the wave of refugees from the what was the afghanistan and eastern some eastern countries went tried to enter poland through belarus and we are we are very conflicted i think every polish person is very conflicted about how to behave towards these people yeah so again i i have my own opinions and again i i lean towards being more uh more tolerant more accepting but i think it's very important not to turn it into a kind of good versus evil situation this is what the democratic process was designed to do it was designed to allow people to have different opinions you have political rivals but don't see them as their enemies and it's the responsibility of both sides not to kind of uh uh again weaponize this issue and depict the other side as engaged in some kind of satanic conspiracy to destroy the nation or whatever um and ultimately what most people most citizens uh uh vote for this is how it happens in a democratic country so the advice is don't weaponize immigration issue yes again for both sides don't weaponize it don't you know kind of inflame it in order to get more more votes or whatever and yeah yes make your arguments make your ethical arguments it's it's a difficult issue try to stay open to the arguments of the other side but start from an understanding that both positions are legitimate those that uh uh want to put a certain limit on immigration it doesn't immediately turn them into nazis and fascists and those that want to accept more immigrants it doesn't immediately turn them into traitors of of an enemies of the people now two legitimate positions uh it's a very difficult choice it's it's not easy there are a lot of issues involved uh what is the carrying capacity of of the country uh what are the the the uh uh positions of the immigrants to what extent the immigrants are willing to uh uh accept the norms the values the culture of the of the host country this is also an important issue so it's a complicated debate and it should be it should remain a complicated debate it shouldn't be oversimplified by turning it into this kind of forces of light versus forces of darkness situation thank you professor harari i feel enlightened and you are a magician because you always find the common ground between the opposing viewers but you seem to always put lots of effort into finding the common ground thank you very much thank you it's a pleasure it was a great pleasure thank you [Applause]

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 81,787

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Id: NZGj0v-2Qbo

Length: 84min 24sec (5064 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022