Yuval Noah Harari: 'The World after Covid', FTWeekend Digital Festival 2021

welcome yuval welcome to the lockdown but very much still happening ft weekend festival thank you for joining us from semi lockdown tel aviv yeah thank you for inviting me what i'd like to do though now is is take the uvalian long view in the context of the millennia of history how do you think this year will be seen oh well i'm not sure it will be remembered you know when you're in the midst of a historical event you're usually convinced this is the most important thing that ever happened but then after a few decades not just a few millennia after a few decades people hardly remember it and we've seen it with previous epidemics epidemics in general tends to leave a much smaller imprint on history than people assume if you think about the big influenza epidemic of 1918 for example it had a far smaller impact than the first world war even though it killed more people if you just you think about out just compare the number of books and poems and tv series about the first world war to them basically non-existent uh crop of poems and books and tv series about the about the influenza now this may be changing now because the nature of pandemics and is changing throughout most of history pandemics were seen as natural disasters beyond the control of humans so they were in this sense less interesting now because of our scientific capabilities pandemics have become a political disaster or a political failure if there is a pandemic it's no longer a natural disaster it's a political failure and therefore they are also becoming much more interesting because politics is always more interesting to people than natural disasters even if it is ostensibly a blip could it be though that that it does have an extraordinary effect on some of the sort of uh subtler uh debates going on for example between autocracy and democracy that this is one of those sort of hinge moments where one or other systems of government is shown to have the upper hand yeah it it it does have an effect on many things from the process of digitalization that has been hugely accelerating over the last year to these political debates whether it's between autocracies and democracies or about the eu or it's about the the u.s federal government um i think the jury is still out what the long-term meaning of the epidemic will be for these political issues it's not very clear whether the conclusion is that autocracies work better or democracies work better there is a lot of evidence for for for both sides and you know that the battle over the narrative is is still going on the history of this has not been the history of of great global government has not been wildly successful you think of the league of nations you think of the united nations which is a bit of a bystander at the moment frankly what gives you ground to believe this is any more than a pipe dream you know on on one level it is a dream it's not a reality it's not like we have a functioning uh global cooperation on covet or on climate change on the rise of ai or anything else my view it's it's not i don't predict that it will happen i just say if it doesn't happen i don't see how humanity can deal with these kinds of threats so maybe we don't maybe we are unable to deal with climate change maybe we are unable as a species to deal with the rise of ai and that's that that that is just it so i hope will uh will become more cooperative and in a sense it's not just a pipe dream because you do see that global cooperation in the early 21st century is much more efficient than in any previous time in history it's far from perfect and of course i mean it's not even clear what perfect is i don't believe in a single global government all over the world i think it's a bad idea it's not only won't work it's really a bad idea we need better cooperation between nation states that that's the essential thing i think that the key message is not that we need to replace nation states with a global government no we need nation states working together on their common interests because there is no contradiction between advancing national interests and cooperating with other countries you know some politicians have this message that nationalism and globalism are contradictory and that you have to choose nationalism and and reject globalism my view is that this is simply a fundamental error there is no contradiction there in many cases like in fighting a pandemic in order to better advance your own national interests you need to cooperate better with other nations and we do have better global cooperation than in any previous time in history and if you just look at the pandemic the level of cooperation between scientists and institut health institutions and universities during this pandemic was really remarkable many of the key insights the key studies were done by an international team of scientists many of the key inventions like the development of vaccines was done not in one country but through cooperation of of many countries so i think we need to kind of have more realistic expectations of what global cooperation means and then we can see it all around us yeah so the early draft the very early draft of history would be it was the year of the scientist and definitely not the error of the politician i think yeah i mean in at least in 2020 you saw amazing success of scientific cooperation and uh a failure of political cooperation and not even on the level of of the entire globe even on the level of single countries you saw like in the united states the failure of the federal government to come up with a single plan for the whole united states now this doesn't mean that federalism doesn't work and that we need to dissolve the us into 50 independent nation states it means we need to try harder let's turn from globalism to another global to another ism an ism that is very close to the ft reader's heart it's capitalism i sense from reading uh your books that well one you you you make very clear that obviously the capitalism won over over communism uh but i don't think you're a sort of total believer in the in the longevity and the future longevity of capitalism do you think cap capitalism will endure or is that just going to be one of these things that that has its moment and then and then disappears it's a question of time scale if you ask me in terms of of years and maybe even decades it will endure you don't see any serious competition at the present but if you think in terms of generations and centuries then something else will come along because you know capitalism is not part of the laws of nature it's not like physics or chemistry it's really just a story that people came up with about how the world works and how the world should work things like corporations and corporate law and money and banks and all this these are our creations they exist only in our own imagination they are not objective entities or objective laws of nature and they couldn't even exist in many previous eras in many previous civilizations because you didn't have the necessary cultural uh foundations to believe in such things so at the present moment we created a world which is conducive to these capitalist institutions and and stories and mythologies and it works better than all the alternatives but things change and you know one of the hallmarks of capitalism or at least free market capitalism which is the main the dominant version of capitalism is that centralized control of the economy doesn't work and one of the main reasons that centralized control of the economy indeed failed to work in the 20th century is because people or institutions lack the capacity to process all the information in one place if you wanted to manage the entire soviet economy in moscow it meant you needed to bring enormous amount of information to one place process it there and make all the decisions there and send the commands the orders everywhere yeah and you just couldn't do it with 20th century technology it was inefficient dispersing the information and dispersing the power to make decisions between many players was more efficient but this is again it's not a law of nature that it's always like that it's only under 20th century technological conditions now the rise especially of artificial intelligence and and big data algorithms may change that maybe we are entering an era in which it is possible to concentrate and process all the information in one place that actually it has an advantage over spreading it between many different players and then a central command economy might become more efficient than a free market capitalist economy and it's not a prophecy it's just a possibility that we need to take into account and and better for the individual for the individual i i don't know but maybe it's just you know even capitalism it's not that it works better for the individual in every case it just out competes yeah the the the other systems so we could enter an era in which no matter what is the impact on the individual in the competition between systems the centralized system is more efficient it works better you've inspired me to um uh to to plan a big debate about about capitalism amongst our readers because i think that some of them will be appalled to hear that it's not a natural part of the natural order of things through most of history when you look at most ancient civilizations and cultures they did not function in a capitalist way so i mean you can argue maybe you can imagine that capitalism was always the natural way to do things and it was kind of stopped by all these religious and cultural and political institutions until finally in the modern age it was liberated from all these impediments and the natural thing could finally run its course but it's very as a historian i find it very unconvincing to think that for most of human history something unnatural was happening and finally in the last two three centuries somehow the natural laws manifested manifested themselves i mean you just need to think that like any economy capitalism works on trust and what makes capitalism really unique and successful is its ability to generate enormous trust between complete strangers without trust there are no markets without trust there are no there is no credit there is no money money is actually just trust if you ask what money is i mean money can be anything it can be paper it can be gold it can be electronic bits on your computer if we have a contract and i break the contract and you take me to quote it's a free market so i pay the judge to rule in my favor in in such a system of course capitalism collapses it needs at least something that doesn't work on free market principle that the judge won't rule in favor of the person that that pays the highest bribe on the subject of trust uh you wrote very powerfully uh a year ago and you returned to this actually a week or so ago about the issue of whether we should trust uh other people to hold our our data and and this all goes to the heart of the debate over surveillance most people when it comes down to it uh if they're given a choice of uh something that makes them healthier and live longer or not having that but but retaining their privacy privacy they would opt for health over privacy you i think are less certain about that and i wonder if you could explain why that is well i think that yeah if you give people a choice between health and privacy they will almost always choose health the problem is that we just don't need to give them this kind of choice it's a it's a false way of presenting the dilemma why should we have to choose between health and privacy ideally we should be able to get both i mean this is a situation already today that when i go to my personal physician she knows a lot of very very private things about me and that's fine because she doesn't share this private data with all kinds of i don't know corporations and political parties and the government or whatnot she is using this data to help protect my health and potentially the health of other people so i think the key thing is just not to present it to the public as a kind of either or choice that you have to choose you want health okay so give up your privacy it shouldn't be like that in in in the last ftps i wrote i suggested like these three basic rules for how can we have we we can have surveillance we need surveillance to fight epidemics we need big data and algorithms and ai to have better health care and but how can we have them and still protect our privacy and our democratic values and there are ways to do it one principle is that whenever you collect data on people the data is used to help the people and not to control or manipulate them or to benefit third parties i mean it sounds simple but in many cases today it's not done the data collected is used for the benefit of somebody else the second principle is that whenever you increase surveillance from top to bottom you must balance it by increasing surveillance from bottom upwards okay the government needs to monitor me more to prevent epidemics that's fine on condition that simultaneously new systems are created to monitor what the government is doing like in this crisis governments are spending enormous amounts of money like we just heard about the 1.7 trillion dollar package passed in in the us so we need better systems that make it very easy for citizens for individuals to see who is getting the money who is making the decisions and and this creates a balance so okay i they know more about me i know more about them and the third principle is that never to allow too much data to be concentrated in just one place whether it's a government or a corporation because this is really the high road to totalitarianism we are now at a point in history that if you have enough data and computing power you can basically hack human beings and know them better than you know but then they know themselves so to prevent this we need to prevent the over concentration in of data and again it doesn't matter if it's concentrated in the hands of a government or of a corporation both are equally dangerous yes you wrote rather wonderfully um uh almost sort of in conclusion to to that sort of passage you wrote uh if you want to prevent a digital dictatorship keep things at least a little inefficient you thought that was rather splendid inefficiency in many systems in life a little inefficiency is a good thing should we say biochemical algorithms are being superseded by electronic algorithms namely in in in um in layman's talk the the age of the robots is is is is upon us and humanity is going to have to sort of take take second place is it possible though that um we are overly gloomy about this and that in just the same way that you chart in your first book but uh millions of years ago uh homo sapiens found fire and learned to master it and and didn't burn out in the flames in the same way that uh we can now uh learn to master this and uh homo sapiens needn't die out yeah i mean there are many scenarios nobody knows for sure the big difference is that this time we are creating something that masters us that's the first time it's happening i mean fire never understood us tools knives wheels uh steam engines none of these things hacked human beings understood human beings or could replace human decision making you always had the human at the center the human brain the human mind at the center making the decisions and all the inventions just gave more power to the human making the decisions what's different now is that you are creating something that makes the decisions instead of me perhaps even better than me now there is a vision that it will be a synergy that i will increasingly make decisions together with the computer together with the algorithm so it's not the replacement of humans by algorithms it's kind of the the merger of humans with algorithms and it is there is such a potential but we don't know for sure i mean if you think again about something like the financial system if you think how many people understand the financial system today i think it's fair to say that it's less than one percent of people on the planet understand how the financial system works now imagine a scenario that in 20 years or 30 years the number is zero the financial system is becoming so complicated so fast because it's increasingly more and more decisions are being made by algorithms and the thing is that this is something that people often miss algorithms make decisions in a fundamentally different way than humans and therefore there is some kind of an unbridgeable gap there like to take let's say a simple decision i applied to the bank and i ask for a loan previously you had a human being go over my data and make the decision and usually humans make decisions on the basis of two three four salient data points so uh think about it politically what happens when you still have a human prime minister because it's important for human to feel safe that they are being managed governed by human beings not by some robots but all the crucial financial decisions are taken by algorithms just because nobody can understand it one more thing on the on the future uh again you you you write at one stage about i guess the biggest thing of all for humanity death uh you said death is a technical problem and every technical problem has a solution uh which seems to suggest that given all you've thought about the last few million years that ultimately we will be able to conquer death potentially i mean it's not it's not again it's not a metaphysical rule coming from from god that people have to die it's a biological process if you understand this process well enough you can manipulate it prevent it stop it i mean for a very long time in evolution organisms didn't die it's i'm not absolutely sure about it but i think that at least some microorganisms they don't necessarily die it's mostly multicellular organisms like ourselves that die um so it's not like it's it's a built-in feature of any life form that it must die or what death even means and if you think about digital life forms it's not so clear what life and death would mean for a digital life form if such a life form can be created personally i don't think we will see it in our lifetime maybe if you're a baby born today to a billionaire you have a chance of living indefinitely maybe but i think for me for me and you it's it's too late i mean it's not moving fast enough that we will be able to prolong life indefinitely and i'm not even sure it's a good thing it can be extremely worrying and creating immense anxiety of course um may all really be preempted by the fact that it's perfectly possible we'll have blown up the planet long before anyone could have learned how to defeat death and and you write about this um you say um way back in the day as it were humans had no more impact on the environment than gorillas fireflies and jellyfish that of course is not the case today we have colossal impact on the on the planet uh the other the other week uh just before your latest essay for the ft bill gates wrote a piece uh uh for the weekend ft uh in which he optimistically argued that um we will innovate our way through the climate crisis that that uh the world won't won't be destroyed by climate change because humanity will will innovate and we'll find the technology to to defeat it what what's your take on that so the big question is who are we some humans will survive climate change but billions of humans might suffer tremendously or die because of it so you know there is no single future to all humans and that's especially true of things like covet of things like climate change so some humans will survive but billions of humans might not and that should be a very big concern for everybody i want to ask you one more question you vow it's about it's about happiness you you uh you you write in your books that that historians too often uh don't consider uh the issue of happiness when they're when they're writing history uh well one of the things about this last year is everyone's had a lot of time or some people have had quite a lot of time to think about their lives and how they how they live them you i think i'm right in saying you go on a one-month retreat every year and you go you go offline uh i i just wonder if you'd learned anything from those retreats about happiness i think a lot otherwise i wouldn't do it every year i think that one thing is that it's good to go offline every now and then that there is a lot of talk these days you know about breaking the chain of infections but we also need to break the chain of infectious thoughts that we are flooded by enormous amounts of information and opinions and thoughts and and worries and and so forth and we need to give our mind a break every now and then again not all the time but every now and then to give the mind a break to be able to start afresh to be able to disconnect from this flood of of news and information and and thought otherwise we get caught up in it up in it and ins it it spirals out of our control what is very obvious to me is that we almost never experience the world as it is we almost always have this um something in front of our eyes a cover a curtain which is produced by our own minds it's the stories that our own mind produces and believes and we go through lives without really seeing the world just seeing this this this curtain and the projections of our own mind and um it's very important to give the mind a break every now and then and be able to kind of detoxify and be able to let go of all these stories and fantasies that that we are creating it's good for our personal well-being but it's also extremely important for the well-being of society and of the world as a whole well i i think we could all sign up to that and now there's a one-word answer that i want from you now you've already thank you so much what are you most looking forward to doing when all the lockdown is over what have you missed most what have i missed most and going back to teach my students at university face to face and not uh online via zoom well i know my student sons would be delighted to hear you say that thank you so much you val thank you for joining us thank you for those mind-expanding thoughts and um uh thank you on behalf of all the readers of the weekend at t thank you

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 409,839

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Id: iWo4OrGhGxI

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021

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