Yuval Noah Harari | talks about Immortality, Happiness and Divinity (A Must Hear)

I'm Paul Kennedy and this is ideas humans are rarely satisfied with what they already have humans are always on the lookout for something better bigger tastier Yuval Harari is a celebrated thing his book sapiens about the history of our species was an international sensation it was translated into 30 languages including English which allowed me to talk to him here at ideas now he's back with another big picture book and in it he looks towards the future of humanity when humankind possesses enormous new powers and when the threat of famine plague is in War is finally lifted what will we do with ourselves what will the scientists investors bankers and presidents do all day write poetry if we're actually on the verge of eliminating famine plagues and war as you've all her Ari says we are then where does that leave us humanity's next targets are likely to be immortality happiness and divinity having reduced mortality from starvation disease and violence we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself and having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into homo Deus homo Deus is the title of Yuval Harari his latest book he joined me in our Toronto studio to talk about the future as he sees it a future where humans become like gods let me tell you it was a mind-bending experience Evo famine plague and war still very much with us what gives you the idea that they're going away what we still have definitely famine plague and war around but far less than in any previous time in history today for the first time in history more people die from eating too much than from eating too little more people die from old age that infectious diseases and more people die from killing themselves from suicide than from war and crime and terrorism put together and he look at Furman especially which was the biggest threat to human life for thousands of years today actually there is no longer any natural famine in the world there is only political famine if people still starve to death in places like Syria or North Korea or Somalia it's not because of an objective lack of food it is because some politician or government or ideology wants them to starve to death and I think that given the progress we've accomplished so far it's not certain but it's likely that in the 21st century we'll be able to bring them under our control okay well moving from famine to plague we might not have to black death anymore but we have AIDS we have malaria there's cancer there's new diseases I mean I did you know bird flu and and Zika I mean there's various viruses that are new is disease disappearing it seems like it's coming this is changing I mean for most of history the main threat was infectious diseases and epidemics which killed up to a third or half of all children before they reached adulthood and which every every few decades you had something like the Black Death coming and killing maybe a quarter or a third of the entire population in the last few decades the advances in medicine have managed to bring down a mortality of children for infectious diseases to the lowest level ever and managed not to completely stop all epidemics but to avoid a repeat of the black death or of the Spanish influenza for example when you heard the Ebola epidemic in West Africa initially experts feared that is the beginning of the new black death but within about three months they managed to bring Ebola under control and in the end Ebola killed 10,000 people which is a terrible thing but it's a completely different story than the black death which killed something like 40 or 50 million people okay no that's famine and plague war you come from Israel how can you say the war is going away yes I mean again you just look at the statistics first of all for much of history maybe about 10 percent of human mortality was because of you and violence today all over the world globally it's about just one percent or maybe a little more than one percent especially if you look at places like Canada statistically the chances of the average Canadian being killed by let's say al-qaeda or Isis is about a thousand times less than the chances of dying from eating too much at McDonald's and McDonald is a thousand times more dangerous to the health of our audience than the Islamic state but you don't you don't hear it in the news because it doesn't make news and even more importantly previously in history we had periods of peace but peace always was a temporary situation the meaning of peace was the temporary absence of war everybody knew that let's say if in the Middle Ages you had peace between the king of England and the king of France something might happen that within one year they will go to war against one another so peace was just the temporary absence of war today in most of the world peace has a completely new meaning peace means the implausible 'ti of war it's simply unthinkable that Britain and France will go to war next year and this is true not only in Western Europe this is true in most of the world there are exceptions of course like the Middle East but in most of the world if you think for example about South America you have to be really crazy to think that next year there might be a big war between Brazil and Argentina there might be a little border incident but an old-fashioned war with Brazilian armored divisions trying to conquer Buenos Aires and Argentinian airplanes bombing entire cities in Brazil this is extremely unlikely to happen they just don't think along these lines anymore okay well then if you dismiss with famine and with with plague and with war what you've done is you've replaced them with three other abstract nouns immortality bliss and divinity that's a pretty big order yes now why have you chosen those three well this is my educated guess of where humanity is headed what are the next big projects of humankind and you already see it happening in Silicon Valley maybe the hottest word today is immortality equality may be out but immortality is very much in Google just established two-three years ago a sub company called calico whose stated aim is to overcome death they say we've solved search so now we'll try to solve death and they're not the only ones you have people like Peter Thiel who are also saying explicitly that what they want to do is to overcome all the age and death and similarly if you think about bliss and even divinity when I say that humans will try to upgrade themselves into gods in the 21st century this is not meant as a metaphor I mean it literally if you think about the old gods of the traditional mythologies like the Hebrew God they have certain qualities not just immortality but maybe above all the ability to create life to design life in the book of Genesis the first thing God does is to create animals and plants and humans according to his wishes now we are in the process of acquiring these divine abilities we want to learn how to engineer and produce life and it's very likely that in the 21st century the main products of the economy will no longer be textiles and vehicles and way pens they will be bodies and brains and minds and I'll say another thing that we are actually trying to go beyond any of the traditional gods because even if you believe the creationists that say that all life has been created by God then the only thing God managed to create in four billion years of life on earth is organic beings all the beings that existed on this planet for four billion years whether amoebas or dinosaurs or giraffes or Homo sapiens they were organic creatures made of organic stuff and now we are in the process of creating the first inorganic entities of the four billion years of evolution it's very likely that within the lifetime of at least some of our listeners we will managed to create the first inorganic artificial intelligence entities it sounds like you're not saying that we're going to be like gods we're gonna be super guards we're gonna be gods to create gods only in a way yes I mean again if you think about ancient mythology you read the Bible the main thing that biblical Judaism was concerned with is agricultural output the main thing the ancient Hebrews expected from their God was to provide rain so you'll be able to water your fields and to provide fertility and to provide protection against all kinds of locusts and diseases and things like that and today modern science is already doing much better than the Hebrew God I mean with all the insecticides and antibiotics and genetic crops and things like that already today what the Hebrews expected from their gods our scientists are doing better [Music] if you think religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and aging Hollywood starlets will do when they think the elixir of life is within reach even when science make significant progress in the war against death the real battle will shift from the laboratories to the parliaments called houses and streets once the scientific efforts are crowned with success they will trigger bitter political conflicts all the wars and conflicts of history might turn out to be but a pale prelude for the real struggle ahead of us the struggle for eternal youth eternal youth I want to focus on where you see that actually happening I mean isn't it already underway and people who go to the spa and who buy creams aren't they looking for currently everybody or not everybody but most people definitely in in modern Western societies are obsessed with with youth and with eternal youth I mean until now people knew that there was a limit to what you can do with going to the gym and buying creams and things like that but just from an economic perspective think what an immense market the market for eternal youth is going to be I mean most likely in the 21st century the biggest market of all will be the market for eternal youth would you personally want to be young forever to live forever as a young person that's a good question I mean a lot of people when they talk about immortality they have a distorted vision of what it means that like you take a pill and you live to be a million and this is not what the people in Silicon Valley are talking about like records file or Peter Thiel what they have in mind is something far more down-to-earth that they will come to you and ask you do you want to live another 10 years in good health the vast majority of people will say yes I want another 10 years in good health and then when these 10 years are over they'll come again and say okay do you want another 10 into renewable country and this is what we're talking about it's not a one-time peel that makes you live to be a million nobody understands what what what it means to live to be a million nobody really wants such a thing but to extend your life a decade in another decade in another decade in good health this is something that I think almost everybody would like to do everybody would like it but who will be able to afford it I mean the way I know that Silicon Valley works the prices go very high it will it be only for the the 1% who couldn't actually pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a pill that might give them ten more years of life healthy life that's the big question at present it seems likely that it will not be available for everybody and that biotechnology will for the first time in history translate economic inequality into biological inequality throughout history you always had inequality but it was always social and economic and political it wasn't biological there wasn't any real difference in physical or mental abilities between the king and the peasant but in 50 years or a hundred years it might be possible for the first time to translate economic inequality into biological inequality and humankind will basically split into different biological castes the rich will enjoy physical and mental abilities which will really be superior to the poor and once such a gap opens it becomes almost impossible to close it because the poor will no longer be able to compete with the rich this is a frightening brave new world and you're talking about a possible existence for most of humanity that will be so far below that of the upper echelons that they won't even recognize all to them it should be emphasized that this is not a prophecy it's just a possibility I mean everything that the book Hammad arrows describes there are not prophecies they are just mapping different possibilities and if you don't like some of the possibilities you can see do something about it I don't think that technology is deterministic with the same technology you can create completely different social systems if you look back then you see that with the technology of the Industrial Revolution trains and electricity and oil and radio you could create a communist dictatorship a fascist regime of a liberal democracy the trains and the radio did not really tell you what to do with them so it's the same with the technologies of the 21st century if we just leave it to market forces then I'm afraid that yes market forces will drive these technologies in the direction of the kind of brave new world with biologically different costs but we don't have to to allow market forces to make the important decisions for us there is still some political options to take these developments in a different direction yeah I think that's an important thing in here you said it's not necessarily a prediction of what will happen it might actually be a call to arms and I want to get to do talk about that later first I want to push you back on something I asked you earlier ok I asked if you wanted we to live forever as a young person you said it was an interesting question you didn't answer the question do you want well personally I definitely don't want to die in the next 10 years and I definitely don't want to age very much if I can keep my physical and mental faculties as they are then yes I'm a good customer for these kinds of developments I think it will be dishonest to pretend to be anything else I mean to get another 10 years of good health yes sure many scholars try to predict how the world will look in 2100 this is a waste of time any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds and this is impossible the many wise answers to the question what would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology all we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds and our present-day Minds cannot grasp what might happen next computers are very much at the center of much of what you're talking about and then some people have used the word transhuman to describe where we're going a point at which there's some sort of convergence between computer intelligence and human intelligence I think Ray Kurzweil who you mentioned uses the word synchronicity that the two will become similar and in fact at some point the Ameri TAS and I'm wondering how far do you see is going down that road I think that artificial intelligence AI is now outperforming humans in more and more tasks and therefore may even push humans out of job market and will create an immense new class the useless class people who can't do anything better than an AI better than computers so they don't have any jobs in any political power but liquid looking even further to the future I think the big danger is that intelligence will simply decouple from consciousness a lot of people confuse intelligence with consciousness because in humans and in all mammals intelligence and consciousness go together intelligence basically is the ability to solve problems consciousness is the ability to feel things to have subjective experiences to feel pain or joy or love or hate or anger or whatever you know we think of one of those being a sort of human territory and one of them being a computer or machine Territory what do you mean by decoupling woody what's an example of them separate but for millions of years of evolution in mammals and humans intelligence and consciousness went together because the way mammals twelve problem is to a large extent by relying on their feelings on their sensations and on their emotions and because they go together people often have the idea that they must go together and in many science fiction movies when computers become super intelligent they automatically also become conscious and they start having emotions and desires and all that now this is definitely not what is happening now computers are not becoming conscious they are becoming highly intelligent over the last 60 or 70 years there has been a tremendous progress in computer intelligence but exactly zero progress in computer consciousness computers in the 1940s had no consciousness no feelings and computers today have no consciousness and no feelings if we look to the future this trend may continue and we may see the emergence of a super intelligence which is completely devoid of consciousness and this super intelligence might make all humans powerless and redundant and may even break out of planet Earth because organic beings have been limited to this planet for four billion years because it's very difficult to sustain organic life in outer space or other planets but a non organic artificial intelligence will find it much easier to survive space travel and to colonize other planets so what we may seem is not just on earth but in the entire galaxy the spread of this in varying high intelligence but devoid of consciousness and this is a very scary scenario imagine not just earth but the galaxy full of intelligence and devoid of consciousness devoid of feelings and emotions so in in some real sense natural selection which Darwin talked about which we've always thought was the way things we're gonna move along it's gonna be replaced with market selection human beings are gonna both be supplying what they want to sell and buying it as well yeah I mean the problem is that from the point of the market consciousness has no value at all but in intelligence is what the market really values if you think about something like a taxi driver so up till now all taxi drivers had consciousness they had feelings they had emotions why not because we need emotions from taxi drivers but simply because the only thing intelligent enough to drive a taxi was human being which came along in in this package you also got consciousness and emotions but within a very short time most experts today estimated within five or ten years hey I will drive cars better than any human being not only more cheaply but far more safely today every year about 1.3 million people die each year from car accidents that's twice the number of people who die from war and crime and terrorism put together and almost all these car accidents are caused by human error and if you replace humans with with algorithms with AI you solve most of these errors and AI a self-driving car will never drink alcohol and drive it will never fall asleep while while driving it will never disobey traffic signals or a stop sign so it's very likely that we will see because what what we need is the intelligence not the consciousness we will see that human drivers are being replaced by these computers by these AI and the world will be a better place event from an economic perspective is definitely yes economic but again the big question is do we want a situation in which eventually everything is super intelligent but without consciousness without emotions without feelings and this is I think a very deep philosophical question and actually if the speaking of philosophy a lot of philosophical questions that for thousands of years were just theoretical riddles for philosophers to pass may become practical questions in everyday life that engineers need to think about again going back to these driverless cars let's say that you have a car that the car is driving and it's about to collide to run over five people and the only way to save these five people is to swerve to the side fall off a cliff and kill the driver what should you do this is the kinds of questions that philosophers have been arguing about for thousands of years and it had very little practical impact because no matter what you said in theory that you will do when you are actually in the situation you did something different but now when you have a driverless car you need to program the algorithm to drive the car with the answer to these ethical questions if a driverless car sees that it's about to run over five pedestrians and it can swerve to the side fall off a cliff and kill its owner what should we do the engineers at Google they need to program the code so they need to answer this philosophical question and the amazing thing is whatever answer they give it will actually be implemented now of course because we live in a market economy maybe they will say let's just leave it to market forces to the customers will produce two cows the Toyota all traced and the Toyota egg waste the Toyota outraised if you buy it but in this situation it will kill you and save the five people the Toyota AYGO East will save you and kill the other five people and customers will just decide which car they want to buy and you know the customer is always white let's be you're listening to ideas on CBC Radio 1 Sirius XM and cbc.ca / ideas we're talking with acclaimed historian Yuval her Ari about his book homo Deus the title of course translates as man God because that's what he believes is happening to our species we're collectively in the process of becoming like gods something our ancestors could only imagine in myths and legends it's this kind of original intellectual portraiture that is one Yuval her re a raft of international awards you can see them on our website cbc.ca / ideas in a short video improvising on terms and ideas we just kind of threw at him for fun here is now ruminating on a crucial term he writes about in his book modernity modernity is a deal all of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born and it regulates our lives until the day we die very few of us can ever assigned or transcend this deal it shapes our food our jobs and our dreams and it decides well we dwell whom we love and how we pass away at first sight modernity looks like an extremely complicated deal it's like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract which is dozens of pages of legalese you take one look at it immediately scroll down to the last page tick I agree and forget about it it in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal the entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power exchanging meaning for power how does that in your mind define the modern era that we live in but in pre-modern times people believe that they are part of some cosmic drama some cosmic plane they have a part to play they don't have much power I mean they must do whatever God decide that they will this is your part in creation this is your part in the universe so you can you don't have the power to change your role but in exchange you got meaning your life really meant something you're playing maybe a small part but you're still playing a part in this cosmic drama and whatever I said whatever I did it it meant something from a cosmic perspective now in the modern world we no longer believe in this cosmic drama there is no drama there is no director there is no screenplay nothing which means on the one hand that everything we do has absolutely no meaning if planet Earth explodes tomorrow morning with all the people on it the universe won't care on the other hand because there is no great play no drama so there is no limit on our power the only limit on our power is our own knowledge or ignorant if we have the knowledge then we can completely change our place in the universe the way we behave everything it's up to us to give meaning to the whole universe and how will you do it by looking inside yourself connecting to your true self connecting to your feelings your emotions your feelings will give meaning not just to your own life but to the entire universe this is the basic message the basic dogma of humanism which have dominated the world for the last two or three centuries the literal meaning of the word individual is something that cannot be divided that I am an individual implies that my truth self is a holistic entity rather than an assemblage of separate parts however over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this little story is pure mythology the single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny if you look really deep within yourself the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices none of which is my true self humans aren't individuals they are dividuals [Music] [Applause] most traditional societies and religions indeed imagined that the way humans make decisions is because they have some spiritual essence called soul or spirit or whatever and in the end in some kind of magical way with freewill or whatever this magical soul makes decisions now over the last two centuries the life sciences have been distancing themselves more and more from this traditional viewpoint and you can summarize I think a hundred fifty years of biological research since Charles Darwin in three words organisms are algorithms the way that all organisms whether it's tomatoes or giraffes or Homo sapiens the way we make decisions is not because of some spiritual essence but in an algorithmic way by biochemical reactions and calculations in our own body I've never heard evolution described as an algorithm before but it makes sense yeah and I can give maybe a simple example of how it works otherwise it sounds very complicated let's say that you're a baboon in the African savanna and you see not far from you there is a tree with bananas but also there is a lion nearby and this is a typical problem of survival that natural selection puts before organisms in order to survive you need to make the right decision to go for the bananas or not now this is basically a problem of calculating probabilities what is the probability that I will starve to death if I don't eat the bananas versus the probability that I will be eaten by the lion if I try to get the bananas so to survive and pass my genes on to the next generation I need to calculate the probabilities correctly how does the baboon calculate probabilities well first I need a lot of data data about the bananas how far are the bananas how many bananas are there big or small ripe or green then any data about the lion how far is the lion is a big of small is the awakened or asleep and I need a lot of information about myself how fast I can run how hungry I am and things like that now you need to take all this data into account and quickly calculate the right probabilities how does the baboon calculate the probabilities not with pen and paper or a pocket calculator the entire body and nervous system and brain of the baboon is the calculator what we call sensations and emotions out of the way in which the baboon takes in all the data makes the calculation and reaches a conclusion the conclusion of the calculation will not appear as a number it will appear as what we call emotion if the probability is positive you should go for the bananas then this will appear as the emotion of courage the baboon will suddenly feel courageous and all is easily puffed up and run to the bananas and if the calculation is negative then this will appear as the emotion fear so what we call emotions are not some spiritual phenomena that comes from God or whatever it's biochemical calculations and yet and I don't know what I'm reaching for here but I'm reaching deep inside myself and that's something people do I mean y-you look for the gut instinct you you you try to find the honest physical almost physiological response or not and I'm still stuck in a world where I wanna cling to that ik and claim there is a self other than something that's just calculating how fast this self can run to get the banana well most people cling to it but most biologists say no there is no self humans and other animals are just a collection of biochemical processes that basically calculate probabilities and for me what brought this home what brought this revolution home was a children's movie I saw this year a very good one by Disney I think inside out did you see it but you know for decades this he has been selling kids all over the world this humanist fantasy that you are an individual and the right way to make decisions in life is getting touches with yourself listen to yourself follow your heart and everything will be okay and this new film inside out it tells about a girl called Riley which moves from Minnesota to San Francisco and she has a crisis and then it looks what's happening inside our head and you find out and this is what Disney is telling the kids now this girl Riley is just a robot inside her head you have all these amazing biochemical mechanisms it shows how dreams are being produced and how emotions are competing with one another and it's there is no self inside there is no inner voice that Riley needs to get in contact with there are just biochemical mechanisms that produce all the decisions that Riley makes and this is Disney okay that's Disney let's let's make it you Val Oh is there a you a new Valley when you wake up every morning in Israel or when you're in a world tour like this you have certain assignments I'm assuming you go to the bathroom and you wash up and then if you're at home you probably go and teach here you get ready to go and do interviews with the likes of me and you follow a daily routine which is which is something that is repeatable you repeat it and I ultimately you begin I would assume to treat that as something like oh that's myself that's what I do that's what I am what happens is that people construct a story about themselves and they become extremely attached to this story they identify with this story and it basically controls their life now this story it's in truth it's an illusion it's a fantasy but it is still very very powerful in the same way that entire human societies are being controlled by fictional stories about God and heaven and the nation and all that so also each individual is actually not I mean the it's a collection of internal entities that are being controlled by this belief in a single overarching story which is in truth fictional now I I do my best to really understand the reality about myself so I spent two hours every day meditating I meditate Vipassana meditation two hours every day to really understand go beyond this fictional story and really look what what am i what is the body what is the mind how are they interacting and this is a very important part of my life and one other thing that I would like to comment on this is that I'm not saying that what I just said about them is no self everything is but just biochemical calculations this is not necessarily the truth this is current scientific dogma there is one thing that this theory so far fails to explain and this is consciousness the mind we don't have any good theory that explains how the brain produces the mind how come when billions of neurons in the brain fire electrical signals one to the other how does this produce a subjective experience of love or hate or pain or joy we have absolutely no idea the scientists are they have kind of a dogma that somehow the neurons produce these experiences and maybe we'll have the good explanation in 20 years or 50 years but at present we don't now it doesn't mean that the old mythological stories of religions like Christianity above the soul that they are right because science can't explain consciousness I don't think we should go back we should go forward which is say yes we don't understand consciousness yet so we need to keep on researching and to invest far more time and energy and money in investigating the mind and not just the brain and the body in the early 21st century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens those who miss this train will never get a second chance in order to get a seat on it you need to understand 21st century technology and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms these powers are far more potent than steam in the Telegraph and they will not be used memory for the production of food textiles vehicles and weapons the main products of the 21st century will be bodies brains and minds and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens's Britain and the mahadesh Sudan indeed it will be bigger than the gap between sapiens and Neanderthals in the 21st century those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction while those left behind will face extinction [Music] according to what you say in the book we're all either going to become gods like Shiva or yahwah or we're gonna die will will disappear is it really that start I think given the current pace of technological development it's very unlikely that human beings like you and me will continue to exist in say 200 years we are one of the last generations of Homo sapiens given the technological powers that we will have either we'll destroy ourselves or we'll upgrade ourselves into something completely different now science is coming and saying we're not there yet but we are getting closer death is no longer a kind of metaphysical decree people have to die because God said so no death is a technical problem and every technical problem at least in principle has a technical solution so we are now working on the technical solution and it's the same with upgrading humans people dreamt about it for thousands of years all the ancient mythologies are full of upgraded super humans but we never had the technology to actually do it so it was all just imagination it was all just fantasies now for the first time we are approaching the point when technology gives us the ability to realize our fantasies but up till now it was mostly the power to change reality outside to change the world to change the geography the economy is a social system but the world inside inside our bodies inside our brains this hardly changed at all we still have the same bodies the same brains that we had 20,000 years ago in the next century or two we will direct our gaze from outside inwards and will start for the first time in history to really change our bodies and our brains and not just the economy or society I wasn't read in the book seemed to imply in fact suggests that that fundamentalism religious fundamentalism is on its way out that it's not something that will last again it's like war and plague and pestilence I look around and I see a lot of people who still believe in God and I don't see that trend necessarily yes it's basically like in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution most people still believe in God not in the steam engine but what changed the world was the steam engine not God and it's happening again now given the tremendous changes were facing already today in the world you see a lot of people trying to cling to some eternal story like God or like the nation but this is unlikely to really stop the change in the world oh to shape the 21st century because these stories don't offer us answers to the big problems of the 21st century the big problems of the 21st century are things like what to do when you can start designing babies with biotechnology what to do when artificial intelligence is pushing humans out of the job market and you have this massive useless class what to do when humankind is being split into different biological castes now you don't find answers to any of these questions in the Bible or in the Quran because the people who wrote these books back in ancient times did not know anything about artificial intelligence or about genetics so it's it's obvious they don't have the answers there if you you need answers you need to create new ideologies new religions and in the same way that in the 19th century we saw the creation of new ideologies like socialism and they really changed the world so I think in the 21st century will again see the rise of new ideologies and new religions coming not from the Middle East but from places like Silicon Valley and they will shape our world much more than the fanatics of the State can you be specific about what these new religions you talk about might look like or sound like or be like yes the most important I think at least at present is data ISM a religion or ideology which worships data and not God and not humans basically what data is insist is that given enough biometric data and given enough computing power an external algorithm can understand me better than I understand myself and once we have such an algorithm Authority will shift away from individual humans to these algorithms so in the same way that authority at first was with the gods above the clouds and then in modern times authority shifted below the clouds to human beings now Authority will shift again back to the clouds but to the Google cloud to the Microsoft cloud this is where authority in the 21st century will reside and all the important decisions will not be made by the Pope or by God they will not be made by democratic elections and by individual consumers they will be made by the algorithms in the cloud technology man ISM agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run at historical cost and will no longer be relevant in the future but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create ho models a much superior human model Modell's will retain some essential human features but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms since intelligence is decoupling from consciousness and since non conscious intelligence is developing at breakneck speed humans must actively upgrade their minds if they want to stay in the game [Music] humanism thought that experiences occur inside us and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens there by infusing the entire universe with meaning data ists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not served and that we need not indeed cannot find meaning within ourselves we need only be called and connect our experience to the great data flow and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do [Music] algorithms telling us what to do may sound like a half-baked notion straight out of second-rate science fiction but you waha Rory maintains that were already getting closer to that reality you actually give a musical example and that's a computer program that was created that actually created a piece of music and it was given to people to listen to and they listened to it they thought it was real music created by a human being what does that tell you actually maybe you can just do an exercise of just you know play the bow and the Emmy music and ask the the listeners what do you think was composed by bus and which one was composed by my computer we can do that in fact we can we can find the examples and lay them so I think this will be amazing here's the background the musicologist was David Koch who was at the University of California he'd invented a computer program called Emmy which could create music then somebody challenged this professor okay let's play the the piece composed by your computer and let's play real bass and we'll see if people will be able to tell the difference so here we go can you tell the difference between a computer-generated piece of music and another one made by the real flesh-and-blood Johann Sebastian Bach here's one piece [Music] and now here's the other [Music] and the amazing thing is that most listeners thought that the real Bach was composed by a computer and that the computer piece was composed by buff for the record the real Bach piece is this one [Music] we are flooded with such examples like just a few months ago there was this famous match of Go Go is there like chess Chinese chess yes it's much more complicated than chess in Finnish and most experts before the match were convinced that there is no way that the computer can beat a human champion at go and the artificial intelligence alphago actually went on to defeat the human champion Lisa doll fought one in a match in Seoul but a really important thing is that go experts then analysed the way in which alphago played and they were amazed because nobody told alphago how to play go they just told that the what are the basic rules what it whatever what it can do and cannot do and then it just they just left it to alphago it played I don't know millions of times against itself to train itself and then it just went on to defeat the world a human world champion it go it gets worse or better depending on your perspective you know how various websites like Amazon recommend future purchases for you based on the data the site collects from near past purchases that kind of predictive algorithm is just in its infancy if you read a book on Kindle so as you read the book the book reads you Kindle knows which pages you read fast which pages you read slow and where you stop reading it gives you a lot of insight about your reading habits and what you like and dislike now already today you can even upgrade Kindle with face recognition programs so it can basically monitor and analyze your facial expression and know if you're laughing if you're crying if you're bored if you're angry in 5-10 years you can connect Kindle to biometric sensors inside your body and that constantly monitor your blood pressure your sugar level your testosterone level everything and then Kindle will know what is the exact emotional impact of every sentence you read in the book now most of what you read you forget very quickly after finishing the book but Kindle which means Amazon will never forget anything it will basically know who you are and how to press your emotional buttons I as I've said repeatedly throughout the conversation this is a brave new world that I'm not sure I wanted to be part of but it's it's interesting the way you've described like I want to close by by posing another question that comes from something you said earlier in the conversation you-you-you said we could have a choice between two kinds of cars that would be self-driving cars so we wouldn't be driving them or ourselves ultimately but we could choose to have either a turd altruist or a Toyota egoist yes which one would you Volvo I don't like driving forward to the moment when I can just give it to the algorithms to drive my car other things I like to keep to myself I think that the key is to really get to know yourself better I mean if you want to compete against the algorithms the question is do you know yourself better than the algorithms know you and so you know the oldest advice in the book know yourself is now becoming far more important than ever before because if you don't know yourself well then you're very easy prey to these algorithms [Music] evolve thank you very much thank you

Channel: School of Peterson

Views: 46,725

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Immortality, Society, Technology, Happiness, Motivation, Self development, Conversation

Id: CHpEtD3lbVE

Length: 53min 37sec (3217 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018