Yuval Noah Harari: Humanidade, não é assim tão simples

foreign [Music] hello and welcome to a very special edition of it's not that simple special because it's the first one ever recorded in first in front of a live audience here at this in Lisbon and also because we're delighted to have our special guest renowned author historian as well Yuval Noah Harari it'll be fantastic to be able to discuss with him his perspective on Humanity which is our topic of the day of course he is globally known for a variety of work in this area about the past present and future of humanity and we're going

to try to explain why it's not that simple um Yuval welcome to Portugal thank you and the premise of this show is trying to break down complicated subjects today's topic is particularly complicated to set the stage I think it'd be nice for you to try to paint a picture of humanity in 2023 and tell us what you see and why it's difficult perhaps to preview the future at this time well we all know almost like gods in terms of our powers of creation and destruction we now have the power to create new life forms but

also to destroy much of life on Earth including ourselves we are facing two really big challenges on the one hand the threat of ecological collapse on the other hand the threat of technological disruption we are creating extremely powerful tools like AI that could uh undermine human civilization and maybe the worst thing is that instead of uniting in order to face these common challenges to our species we are dividing we are fighting each other more and more the rising tensions on the international level there are rising tensions within societies uh one Society after the other is

really on the brink of collapse so you know maybe the most important question to ask about humans about humanity is if we are so smart why are we doing so many stupid things why are we called our species homo sapiens wise humans and yet we are engaged in so many self-destructive activities and we seem unable to stop ourselves so that that I think is the Paradox of of the the the smart humans the wise humans it's a great place to start and you know when I was introducing you obviously I was very short because I

want to make the most out of these 40 minutes that I have with you I could list your accolades and your books and your achievements better yeah yeah but let's focus on the on on the content and um obviously uh I've I've heard a lot of your of your interviews of your talks and there's something that we can't get around at the moment in 2023 which is technology the advance of Technology you know when I was growing up and we're more or less the same age I'm 48. I still remember that pong game where you

had basically two white rectangles going back and forth with the ball bouncing off the the screen and it's crazy where we are now you know I have a two and a half year old daughter and this new frontier of artificial intelligence is incredibly dangerous I think because I'm really wondering what her generation is going to be like how they're going to learn how they're going to do anything for themselves um tell us about AI in your words the the opportunities and the challenges that you see so we need to know three things about AI first

of all AI is still just a tiny baby we haven't seen anything yet um real AI deployed into the world not in some laboratory or in science fiction is about like 10 years old and you know you look at the wonderful scenery outside of of all these plants and trees and you think about biological evolution the evolution of life on Earth took something like 4 billion years four billion years to reach these plants and to reach us human beings now ai is now at the stage like of I don't know amoebas it's like four billion

years ago and the first living organisms are crawling out of the organic soup and so cha GPT and all these wonders they are the amoebas of the AI world what would T-Rex look like and how long would it take for the AI amoebas to evolve into the T-Rexes and it won't take billions of years maybe it takes just a few decades or a few years because the evolution of AI is at a completely different time scale than the evolution of organic beings because AI itself works on a different time scale AI is always on one

of the computers in general are always on humans and other organic organisms they they live they exist they develop by Cycles we need to rest sometimes hey I never needs to rest now the other two things we need to know about AI is that first it's the first technology ever that can make decisions by itself I hear a lot of people saying oh all these worries about AI every time there is a new technology people worry about it and afterwards it's okay like when people invented writing and printing presses and airplanes they were so worried

and in the end it was okay I will be the same it's not the same no previous technology in history could make decisions you know even an atom bomb actually empowered humans because an atom bomb can destroy a city it cannot decide which city to bomb you always need a human to make the decision AI is the first technology that can make decisions by itself even about us increasingly we apply to a bank to get a loan it's an AI making the decisions about us so it takes power away from us the third thing about

AI that everybody needs to know it's the first technology ever that can create new ideas you know the printing press radio television they broadcast they spread the ideas created by the human brain by the human mind they cannot create a new idea you know Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century the the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it but it did not create a single new page it had no ideas of its own about the Bible is it good is it bad how to interpret

this how to interpret that AI can create new ideas can even write a new Bible we you know throughout history religions dreamed about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence by a non-human entity or every religion claims our book all the art books of the other religions they humans wrote them but our book no no no no it came from some superhuman intelligence in a few years there might be religions that are actually correct that just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI that could be a reality in a

few years you know um when I Was preparing this interview I wrote down questions that I would like to ask you and then I asked chat GPT to create 10 questions that I would like to ask you and I've been doing this for a long time okay 25 years I've been doing this and it's questions were better than mine I'm gonna be honest with you it was absolutely insane and it took it five seconds seven seconds to write it out and I'm still using the first version and when you talk about it being a baby

I'm like that's pretty scary baby we're talking about here right um and and and when you when you said it at the end towards the end of your your book 21 lessons for the 21st century when we have maybe decades you see some years left before when we need to discover who we are before algorithms tell us who we are how fast is that happening and what does that process look like before humans normally are just going to go to an AI solution before they go to this solution it's it's moving faster than I think

almost anybody expected faster than I expected despite all my engagement with the field and what I wrote in homodels and 21 lessons I'm still surprised by how fast it is moving and how powerful the new generation of AI is and actually the new generation is not out it's it's in the Laboratories but it's already there it's even much more powerful than chart GPT um and I think that to have a fighting chance we need time again I said before humans we are organic beings we move in Cycles we move on organic time and we are

the most maybe the most adaptable animals on the planet but adaptation itself requires time and now we've reached a point when there is no time AI is moving too fast and I think that it's the responsibility therefore of government to buy us Time by slowing it down now I have no uh illusion that we can stop researching AI it's not going to happen but what I expect from governments is to regulate the deployment of AI into society which governments do it with so many other products you know if I'm a a drug company and I

develop a new drug a new medicine I can't just begin to sell it to people unless it first goes through a complicated and sometimes lengthy process of checking it for safety side effects and so forth if I build a new type of car I cannot just place it on the road and start driving it has to go through again a lengthy process of of making sure it's safe we need the same thing for AI it's it's just common sense there's no doubt about it but let's be honest here different governments have different interests and many

times they're not exactly walking around you know playing nice with each other all the time are you doing it no I'm not I swear I'm not doing it it's how how can we regulate this really and and hold people accountable in this process that is so dangerous because as you said there are new ideas being created these new ideas can fall into the wrong hands yeah so what are we looking at here from a a governmental standpoint so again we need to to distinguish between regulating deployment and regulating development ideally we should be able to

regulate development too but that's much much more danger and difficult because of this what you talked about of the arms race like every government would say we don't want to develop this dangerous technology but the Chinese are doing it the Israelis are doing it so we have to do it also that's very difficult but deployment is should be more easy that okay you research new generation of AI but you cannot deploy it let's say in the EU unless it goes first through these safety checks now if the Chinese want to deployment in China okay they

can go ahead and deploy it in China but they can't do it in the EU and of course democracies and dictatorships have different needs one of the dangers big dangers of AI is that it will basically you know destroy the Democratic conversation you know dictatorships are based on dictating one person dictating everything democracy works by having a conversation between people what should we do about this or that now conversation is is done with language and the basis control conversation is trust between people now what happens when you have entities which are not human at all

and can converse with you and be even more persuasive or create intimate relationships with you and you don't even know that they are not human so you go online and have a discussion about I don't know the Russian invasion of Ukraine and it's a very nice person and it Knows by some Supernatural ability just how to uh say exactly what you think and get into your good graces and after a few weeks of building this kind of very good relationship with you it starts telling you you know actually there are some uh valid reasons why

the Russians invaded Ukraine and you think it's a human being and maybe you develop feelings for that person but actually it's a Russian bot now we know in in previous years that there was a battle for human attention between algorithms trying to grab our attention and this was one of the main reasons for the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories and hatred because the algorithms discovered that the easiest way to grab your attention is with hatred and outrage and fear now the Battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy that will we if we don't

regulate it there will be an arms race for intimacy different AIS competing to create intimacy with us because the easiest way to persuade you to change your political views to buy some product to vote from some politician is to create an intimate connection and this will destroy democracy if we allow it to happen because democracy is a conversation between people if it becomes a conversation between Bots and people where the Bots have all the power that's the end of democracy and again this should be a very simple regulation it's not regulating the development of AI

capable of forming intimacy it's just have a very clear low that it is illegal to counterfeit humans for thousands of years we had laws that it's illegal to counterfeit money if we didn't have these laws the economic system would have collapsed it's easy to counterfeit money but if you do that you go to jail for many many years it should be the same with humans until now there was no technology that could do that so there were no such lows but there should be a very clear and varying extreme low that if you or your

platform counterfeits humans you go to jail to 20 years now it's okay you know like we need AI doctors it's fine as long as the AI tells us it's an AI and you interact with it it tells you hello I'm an AI doctor do you want some advice on your whatever that's fine but impersonating a human being and then using it in order to manipulate you that should be outlawed you know it's interesting because many people here maybe saw the case of Bruce Willis when there was a deep fake of Bruce Willis participating in an

ad campaign in in Russia and he actually had to come out and say hey guys that's not me that's a computer generated image and this is just a small example of many others that could come our way whether it's with real people that already exist being duplicated right which could also be incredibly dangerous if something is posted on social media or just completely uh anonymously generated humans as well that are actually AI yes you mentioned algorithms uh you mentioned Bots and our first experience with these words and with these tools and phenomena I think was

in social media and you said that in our first kind of battle with AI or contact with the AI we lost yes with social media how do you see the social media sphere now because I see the world increasingly polarized and there's it's so difficult to find common ground and Common Sense where people are constantly looking to feel right and good about their ideas instead of identifying facts where they care more about opinions than actually facts which is again is very worrying in political uh elections and the sort and of course we've got a big

one coming in the United States we saw what happened the last time around so I know there's a lot to unpack there but as far as artificial intelligence and the impact that it is having in our behavior and how it can affect the outcome of Elections what do you see so again if we look back at social media so we know it's of course not the only reason for polarization in the world but it is a major reason and it's the first time that decisions made by non-human intelligence have changed human politics now when you

ask many of these companies Facebook and YouTube and Twitter they say it's not us it's not us we are just a platform just as you Can't Blame a radio the technology of radio if Hitler gives a speech on the radio and you cannot blame the printing press if somebody uses the printing press to print some fake news propaganda you cannot blame us if if humans go online and create some conspiracy theory that radicalizes people and polarizes Society naive and don't know their own power or they are lying to us they're lying to us because because

they've got data because newspapers didn't have data radios didn't have data it's not just the data it's the decisions that radio did not push you know radio did not tell you what to listen to you had to actively choose I want to listen to this station I want to listen to that station what happened in social media over the last 10 years or so is that you had recommendation algorithms that actively push content to people recommending read this article watch this video and even more than that if you watch YouTube and you do nothing it

keeps showing you one video after the other it doesn't you don't need to do anything active you just sit there I don't know you start with I don't know you want to know something about the 911 attacks so it starts with I don't know a video from CNN and you do nothing within a couple of iterations it would show you the most outrageous conspiracy theories and the algorithm chose to show you that and the algorithm is making the choice not randomly it has aims it was given an aim by the platforms to increase user engagement

like they said okay today we have 200 million people watching 40 minutes a day by next year it should be 300 million people watching for 50 minutes a day that was the aim of the algorithm go out and get us more eyeballs get us more minutes on our platform and the algorithm went out and discovered by trial and error by experimenting on hundreds of millions of people that the easiest way to grab our attention to keep us watching more and more is to press the outrage button if you have one video which with this outrageous

conspiracy theory which encourages hate and polarization and you have another video which is much more moderate and calm the algorithm would go for the outrage because it increases user engagement and this was this very primitive AI and the AI of the present generation it can know you much much better than the AI say of 2016 and it can also generate the content by itself it doesn't need to wait for a human to create this outrageous fake news story it can create the fake news story or video by itself so again if we don't regulate that

um the chances of democracies surviving are very very low because again the dictatorships will survive dictatorships they flourish on chaos and on mistrust if you cause people to mistrust each other until they cannot agree on anything then the only way to still have a society is have a dictatorship to have a democracy you need that people trust each other and can have a meaningful conversation one thing that I think about a lot is education um the Francis Foundation is an education platform um there has been a particular structure to education of young people throughout their

formative years and the way I look at technology and especially with AI coming and my little experience with it is what is this going to cause as far as the structure of Education globally where children won't really have to study that much and read books that much in order to be able to have access to everything within a few seconds on their tablet or on their phone how how do you see the the future of education and and the generations to come and and the kind of information that they will have you know it's the

biggest experiment in history conducted on billions of people we have no idea what the social consequences the psychological consequences will be um what happens when you can get just any answer to any question any any question you have you don't need to do anything you just ask your AI assistant and you know even Google is terrified because of that because in Google um you still had to okay you you Googled something it gave you a list of websites you usually go for the first one and that's a problem but okay you do it but then

you hit to to do something yourself you have to read it um now it's a new generation of AI you don't you just ask the question and you get an answer and the big question is do you still have some kind of ability of CR for critical thinking to doubt the question you received and to search for alternative questions or for come up with your own questions and sorry alternative answers and to come up with your own answers um and we don't know again you have this kind of tendency to say yeah we had many

previous Revolutions in information technology that people were afraid when books came along that people will not be able to remember anything because they now everything is written but as I said in the beginning AI is fundamentally different from every previous Information Technology it can make decisions it can create content by itself we will never faced by this kind of Technology um and so we have no idea what the outcome would be in 10 or 20 years in terms of Education or of anything else I want to move away from AI specifically for a little bit

but continue on on technology which continues to have such an impact in our daily lives I think most of us can be too far away from our phones for Better or For Worse we can do everything uh on there when it comes to technology um it is affecting the way in which we relate to each other um you know sometimes I I talk to my friends uh about the fact how in a way we're regressing we're ever more connected than we have been before but we communicate in a more distant way than perhaps we have

in in previous decades where you know we've kind of gone back to the Egyptians with the hieroglyphics with the Emojis you know and this is the way we're communicating with each other I know you've you've spent so much time thinking and writing about human relationships and the way in which you see the homo sapiens interacting with each other what what would you say about the way that we are dealing with one another these days and how how it will evolve because physical contact seems to be harder and harder to get because more people are staying

at home they're not going to work as much a lot of dating starts online and I know that for example with your partner you met your partner online right so how do you see this this development of personal relationships and connections which we continue to need in order to be sane I guess yeah um so again there is positive potential there is negative potential I talked a lot about and I tend to talk a lot a lot about the negative potential because you know the people who develop the technology they talk a lot about all

its good good sides all its promises and there are of course a lot of positive uh potential benefits as you mentioned I met my husband online more than 20 years ago in one of the first gay dating sites that were available in Israel and this was and the technology was was very important and beneficial because you know throughout history um you had minorities which were concentrated in one place like if you're Jewish then you're usually born to a Jewish Family in a Jewish community so you know lots of other Jews so even if you are

a small minority um you have this kind of basic connection with other people like you but with gay people it's different you're not born to a gay family in a gay community um and you know being grazed growing up in a small town in Israel which was very homophobic Society at the time just meeting other people just meeting guys for dating was very difficult and then the internet came along and this was a wonderful development Because the Internet managed to connect this kind of of you know uh uh diffused minorities that are not living together

in the same place suddenly it became much more easy to find each other so this was a great benefit of the technology and we shouldn't ignore the the the these benefits but as you said uh humans deep down we are social animals and sociability ultimately is is about the body it's not just about the mind and you have this discussion for you know for thousands of years about what humans really are an immaterial Soul or an immaterial mind or are they embodied beings embodied entities and um this was a major philosophical topic that you see

say in ancient Christianity this discussion that Jesus and the first Christians influenced by Jewish Traditions they believed very firmly that humans are bodies which is why Christ rises in the body he's resurrected in the body and when Christ initially talks about the Kingdom of Heaven he means the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth he tells his followers that they'll be this perfect kingdom here on Earth you know his trees and stones and people but over time under the influence especially of platonic philosophy Christianity drifted away from this view of humans as embodied and placed greater and

greater emphasis on the immaterial soul or mind it imagined that the bodies is dirty the body is animalistic the body there is something wrong with it and when you die you are not coming back in the body your soul is liberated from the material body and it goes not to a kingdom on Earth but to Heaven which is a completely immaterial Realm so the Christian fantasy became to completely disconnect from the body and this remained a fantasy for thousands of years now with the technology of the 21st century a lot of very ancient philosophical and

Theological debates are becoming practical so going with your example let's say we you have some teenager or some person whatever age sitting at home never leaving home in front of a screen maybe with some 3D glasses or something they live their lives online in a way they are realizing the platonic ideal of disconnecting the soul or mind from the body so what do we see there is it um human being trapped within a room losing connection to the real world or is it a human being liberated from the restrictions of the biological body with all

its messiness and and then dirt and whatever and liberating their spirit to wander around the immaterial Heavenly realm of cyberspace well there are no bodies now personally if you ask me um I think the early Christians were right that humans are embodied entities if you try to disconnect the Mind from the body or the soul from the body it leads in a very dangerous Direction that you you can't really do it and it will be destructive psychologically and socially but that's just my opinion you have lots of people today when you hear for instance people

talk about the metaverse the metaverse is exactly that it's the idea of creating an immaterial Realm which is made entirely of data there is no biology there there is no physics as we know it there I wanted to get your take on how you see the future of of work um I was I was seeing yesterday that that BT British Telecom is laying off 55 000 people until 2030 because of the introduction of AI and increased technology that will not need as many human beings to be sitting in seats as they are today what's the

most important skill the most important resource that you think we need to have as human beings to flourish and to survive in the coming years the ability to keep changing no single skill will is safe like previously people thought that okay all these jobs will disappear but we'll need lots of coders to write code all the AI all the algorithms the new generation of AI can code so maybe you don't need any human coders or very few human coders in in a couple of years we don't know what are the most the safe skills we

do know that the job market will keep changing it's not that all jobs will disappear totally many jobs will disappear but many new jobs will emerge which we can hardly even imagine today but people will need to retrain themselves and this is difficult not just financially like you lose your old jobs your old job you need a couple of weeks months maybe years to retrain for a new job who is going to support you during this transition the psychological problem is is even bigger we are not built for this rapid constant changes think that you

have to reinvent yourself professionally even personally every five years who can do that so it's not that we need to learn a specific skill we need to kind of rebuild our entire mind to be much more flexible and this is something that individuals cannot do by themselves eigen governments societies will have to step in and uh provide with I I think with mental and psychological support because the biggest difficulty will be the the stress change is always stressful and the level of stress in the world just keeps Rising more and more and we are I

think we are close to the point when we can just can't take it anymore it's moving too fast and going back to what we discussed at the very beginning that we are organic beings we need to sleep we need to rest we need to take time off it's difficult for us to change and we now live in a world increasingly dominated by inorganic entities that never sleep that don't need to rest that go don't go on vacations and that change at a pace which is just impossible for organic entities so if we don't find a

way to basically give us a break to slow things down a little so that our organic bodies can keep Pace we will break down and psychologically we're getting close to our quick fire questions that we ask all our guests before we do and also in a kind of short answer ish I'm not good in that short answer is I don't think that's a word but I just made it up um what what gets you the most excited right now most excited optimistically and what drives you absolutely insane about the world today so I guess a

sentence maybe so what drives me insane is the need for excitement okay I think that constant stimulation right yeah I think you know especially in the states I don't know how it is here in Portugal but when you go to the States now everything is exciting like you meet somebody I'm so excited to meet you and you have a new idea oh this idea is like your business plan is so exciting the world has totally lost its meaning yeah and people forgot that it's not good to be excited all the time it's just not good

for you it's exhausting too right it's exhausting so I think people should say I'm so relaxed to meet you okay what gets you excited then without getting exhausted um what are you positive most positive about right now today yeah in in the world besides the Portuguese dinner you're going to have um well I think that humans have an still an amazing ability to change we don't really know ourselves we have immense potential which we are not even aware of one of the worst things about the AI Revolution is that it could cause us to lose

much of our potential without even realizing that we've lost it um that you know I said that AI is nowhere near its full potential that it's just a baby I think humans are in the same situation we are nowhere near our full potential if we invest for every Euro and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence we invest another Euro and another minute in developing our ourselves are our minds our Consciousness then we will be okay but of course it's the the incentive structure of society of the economy it pushes Us in the

wrong direction and um you know like with the algorithms in social media we need to change the incentive structure yeah okay quick fire time yes I feel like I should get closer but I'm um what is one personality trait that a good leader could really benefit from having and why so in one sentence please inauthenticity not being authentic um the worst thing what we now have as are all these authentic leaders who think that politics is something like Psychotherapy that we should just say the first things that comes to your mind no politics is not

therapy you want to say the first thing that comes to your mind you want to let your Eid lose go to therapy when you go to politics you build a wall not on the border of the country you build a wall between your mind and your mouth and you're very careful about which immigrants are passing through the world maybe you're referring to someone in particular what is the biggest challenge humanity is facing now itself its inability to cooperate again I would say AI I would say uh uh the the climate change if we can cooperate

we can deal with AI and climate change if we don't cooperate it's it's hopeless you know just a quick aside in Brackets sometimes I think about the movie arrival when the alien species comes down and it's the only time where we actually collaborate and talk the same language to deal with this one issue it doesn't work I mean you're probably not going to take that I think but it's yeah again you don't have to react to that I just I just think of that moment as a like alien species coming down we just encountered an

alien intelligence here on Earth it didn't come from outer space it came from Silicon Valley yeah and we are not uniting in the face of it we are just bickering and fighting even more yeah okay last two questions if you could change one thing in the world by Magic today what would it be hmm with your Harry Potter change one thing in the world hmm ability for us to get together maybe or get along I mean I already said that that this is like my my I would say that I would change the um um

human understanding of of themselves to Place more emphasis on our shared biological reality and less on all the kind of fictional stories that we create with our minds because in our minds all of us individuals and also groups of people every nation creates a story that we are different we are special we are better than all of them so we can't cooperate with them and we should focus on ourselves and um if we could just let go of these stories for a little while and again go back to the level of the body we would

realize that we are all the same you know thing I think said its best in Russians in this uh song from the 1980s that we share the same biology regardless of ideology it was true in the 1980s it was kind of his vision for how to overcome the Cold War and prevent nuclear disaster and it's still true today we all of us share the same biology irrespective of our ideology and religion and whatever didn't he also say the Russians have children too or something like that he said it I I hope the Russians love their

children too right which of course the answer is yes obviously again that's everybody loves their children and if we remember that yeah and let go a little of our ideological and religious fantasies that That's the basis to to create a better world for everybody okay that that was an outrageously long answer I know that was a lot longer than one sentence so one sentence for this one otherwise uh they'll kill me um what's the most important learning of your life to date the one thing um meditation to observe myself again to observe how my mind

constantly creates fictional stories and be able to let go of them for a little while and just be in touch with the reality as it is that was one sentence thank you so much you all know a Harari an absolute pleasure the light to have you with us here on the first ever Live recorded show of it's not that simple thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music]