Yuval Noah Harari’s guidebook for navigating the age of AI

Who is supposed to be the arbiter of truth

Between the human and the computer together, do you think that AI will actually help us

Let me ask you how you think this is going to impact democracies. What are some arguments for and against a future

in which humans only have relationships with AI? What is your worst-case fear about all of this

I'm Yuval Noah Harari. I'm a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

and the author of Nexus, a history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI

If you consider, for instance, that we have managed to reach the moon

to split the atom to decipher DNA, and yet with all our knowledge and wisdom

we are on the verge of destroying ourselves. And a traditional answer to this question is that there is something wrong in human nature

But the problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information

If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. So why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years of history

Why is it that very sophisticated societies in the 20th and 21st century have been as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusion and psychosis and the rise of destructive ideologies like Stalinism or Nazism

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here. It is a privilege for me to be here with you

I have been a longtime fan of his back when Sapiens was first published. And there is so

much to talk about between then and now and how we think about AI and how we think about this new

reality, something that I think was actually a theme in your earliest books about reality and

truth and information, and in a world where it's going to become all electronic and in a cloud in

the sky in a whole new way, what it ultimately means when you think about history. So thank you

for being here. We're going to talk about so many things, but I'm going to tell you where we want to

start tonight, if I could. I want to read you something. This is you. You said that humankind

mankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation. But the way these

networks are built predisposes them to use power unwisely. Our problem then is a network problem

you call it. But even more specifically, you say it's an information problem. I want you to try to

unpack that for the audience this evening, because I think that that, more than anything else in this

book, explains, or at least sets the table for what this discussion is all about

So basically, the key question of the book, and of much of human history, is if we are so smart

why are we so stupid? That's the key question. I mean, we can, you know, we can reach the moon

We can split the atom. We can create AI. And yet we are on the verge of destroying ourselves

And not just through one way. Like previously we just had nuclear war to destroy ourselves

Now we've created an entire menu of ways to destroy ourselves. So what is happening

And, you know, one basic answer in many mythologies is that there is something wrong with human nature

that we reach for powers that we don't know how to use wisely

that there is really something deeply wrong with us. And the answer that I try to give in the book is that the problem is not in our nature

the problem is in our information. That if you give good people bad information, they will make bad decisions

self-destructive decisions. And this has been happening again and again in history

Because information isn't truth and information isn't wisdom. The most basic function of information is connection

Information connects many people to a network. And unfortunately, the easiest way to connect large numbers of people together

is not with the truth, but with fictions and fantasies and delusions

I was going to say, there's a sense, though, that information was supposed to set us free

Information, access to information across the world was the thing that was supposed to make us a better planet

Why would it do that? Well, there was a sense that people in places that didn't have access to communication tools and other things

didn't have access to information and didn't have access, and maybe to put a point on it, to good information

you make the argument and now to go back to sapience frankly um you talk about different

types of realities and this is what i think is very interesting because you talk about objective

reality you know we can go outside and we can see that it's not raining and the sky is blue and

you'd say that's an objective reality right but then there is these other kinds of realities that

you talk about which makes us i think susceptible to what you're describing when i say susceptible

this idea that we as a group, as a humanity, that we are storytellers and that we are okay

oddly enough, with what you've described as a fictional reality. Yeah, I mean, to take an example, suppose we want to build an atom bomb

So to do that, suppose, just suppose somebody wants to build an atom bomb

You need to know some facts to build an atom bomb. You need some hold on objective physical reality

If you don't know that E equals mc squared, if you don't know the facts of physics

you will not be able to build an atom bomb. But to build an atom bomb, you need something else besides knowing the facts of physics

You need millions and millions of people to cooperate. Not just the physicists, but also the miners who mine uranium

and the engineers and builders who build the reactor, and the farmers that grow rice and wheat in order to feed

all the physicists and engineers and miners and so forth. And how do you get millions of people to cooperate on a project

like building an atom bomb? If you just tell them the facts of physics

look E equals MC squared now get to it Nobody would do it It not inspiring It doesn mean anything in this sense of giving motivation

You always need to tell them some kind of fiction, fantasy. And the people who invent the fictions are far more powerful

than the people who know the facts of physics. In Iran today, the nuclear physicists are getting their orders from people who are experts in Shiite theology

In Israel, increasingly, the physicists get their order from rabbis. In the Soviet Union, they got it from communist ideologues

In Nazi Germany, from Hitler and Himmler. It's usually the people who know how to weave a story

that give orders to the people who merely know the facts of nuclear physics

And one last point, crucial point, is that when, if you build a bomb

and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build a story and ignore the facts of history and biology and whatever

the story still explodes. And usually with a much bigger bank. And so one of the underlying conceits of this book, in my mind as a reader, is that you believe that AI is going to be used for these purposes. Yes

And that AI ultimately is going to be used as a storyteller to tell untruths and unwise stories

And that those who have the power behind this AI are going to be able to use it in this way

Do you believe it's that people are going to use the AI in the wrong way or that the AI is going to use the AI in the wrong way

Initially, it will be the people. But if we are not careful, it will get out of our control and it will be the AIs

I mean, maybe we start by saying something about the definition of AI because it's now kind of this buzzword, which is everywhere

And there is so much hype around it that it's becoming difficult to understand what it is

whenever they try to sell you something, especially in the financial markets

they tell you, oh, it's an AI. This is an AI chair, and this is an AI table

and this is an AI coffee machine. So buy it. So what is AI

So if we take a coffee machine as an example, not every automatic machine is an AI

Even though it knows how to make coffee when you press a button, it's not an AI

It's simply doing whatever it was pre-programmed programmed by humans to do. For something to be an AI, it needs the ability to learn and change

by itself and ultimately to make decisions and create new ideas by itself. So if you approach

the coffee machine and the coffee machine on its own accord tells you, hey, good morning, Andrew

I've been watching you for the last couple of weeks and based on everything I learned about you

and your facial expression and the hour of the day and whatever

I predict that you would like an espresso, so here I made you an espresso

Then it's an AI, and it's really an AI if it says

and actually I've just invented a new drink called Bespresso, which is even better, I think you would like it better

so I took the liberty to make some for you. Then it's an AI, when it can make decisions and create new ideas by itself

And once you create something like that, then obviously the potential for it to get out of control and to start manipulating you is there

And that's the big issue. And so how far away do you think we are from that

When OpenAI developed GPT-4 like two years ago, they did all kinds of tests

what can this thing do? So one of the tests they gave

GPT-4, was to solve capture puzzles. That when you access a web page

a bank or something, and they want to know if you're a human being or you're a bot

so you have these twisted letters and symbols. You guys all know this

This is the nine squares, and it says which one has something with four legs in it

and you see the animal. All these kinds of things, yeah. And GPT-4 couldn't solve it

But GPT-4 accessed TaskRabbit, which is an online site where you can hire people to do all kinds of things for you

And, you know, these captures were developed so humans can solve them, but AI still struggle with them

So it wanted to hire a human to solve the problem for it

Now, and this is where it gets interesting, the human got suspicious. The human asked, why do you need somebody to solve your capture puzzles

Are you a robot? And at that point, GPT-4 said, no, I'm not a robot

I have a vision impairment, which is why I have difficulty with these captures

So it knew how to lie. It had basically theory of mind on some level

It knew what, you know, there's so many different explanations and lies you can tell

It told a very, very effective lie. It's the kind of lie that, okay, vision impairment, I'm not going to ask any more questions about it

I will just take the word of GPT-4 for it. And nobody told it to lie, and nobody told it which lie will be most effective

It learned it. the same way that humans and animals learn things by interacting with the world

Let me ask you a different question. To the extent that you believe that the computer will be able to do this to us

will with the help of the computer, we be able to avoid these problems on the other side

Meaning there's a cat and mouse game here. And the question is, between the human and the computer together

will we be able to be more powerful, and maybe power is good or bad

but be able to get at truth in a better way? Potentially, yes

I mean, the point of talking about it, of writing a book about it

is that it's not too late. And that also the AIs are not inherently evil or malevolent

It's a question of how we shape this technology. We still have the power

We are still, at the present moment, we are still far more powerful than the AIs

They, in very narrow domains, like playing chess or playing Go, they are becoming more intelligent than us

But we still have a huge edge. Nobody knows for how many more years

So we need to use it and make sure that we direct the development of this technology in a safe direction

Okay, so I'm going to make you king for the day. What would you do

How would you regulate these things In an environment and world where we don have global regulators we don have people who like to interact and even talk to each other anymore frankly Where we talked about regulating social media at least in the United States for the past 15 years now and have done next to nothing

How we would get there, what that looks like. You know, there are many regulations we should enact right now, and we can talk about that

one key regulation is make social media corporations liable for the actions of their

algorithms, not for the actions of the users, but for the actions of the corporate algorithms

And another key regulation that AIs cannot pretend to be human beings. They can interact

with us only if they identify as AIs. But beyond all these specific regulations, the key thing is

institutions. Nobody is able to predict how this is going to play out, how this is going to develop

in the next 5, 10, 50 years. So any thought that we can now kind of regulate in advance

it's impossible. No rigid regulation will be able to deal with what we are facing

We need living institutions that have the best human talent and also the best technology

that can identify problems as they develop and react on the fly

And we are living in an era in which there is growing hostility towards institutions

But what we've learned again and again throughout history is that only institutions are able to deal with these things

not single individuals and not some kind of miracle regulations. Play it out

What is the, and you play it out in the book a little bit when it comes to dictators and your real fears

What is your worst-case fear about all of this? One of the problems with AIs is that there isn't just like this single nightmare scenario

With nuclear weapons, one of the good things about nuclear weapons, it was very easy for everybody to understand the danger

because there was basically one extremely dangerous scenario. nuclear war, with AIs because they are not tools like atom bombs

They are agents. That's the most important thing to understand about them

An atom bomb ultimately is a tool in our hand. All decisions about how to use it and how to develop it, humans make these decisions

AI is not a tool in our hand. It's an autonomous agent that, as I said, can make decisions and can invent ideas by itself

And therefore, by definition, there are hundreds of dangerous scenarios that many of them we cannot predict because they are coming from a non-human intelligence that think differently than us

You know, the acronym AI, it traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but I think it should stand for alien intelligence, not in the sense that coming from outer space, in the sense that it's an alien kind of intelligence

It thinks very differently than a human being. And it's not artificial because an artifact, again, is something that we create and control

And this is now has the potential to go way beyond what we can predict and control

Still, from all the different scenarios, the one which I think speaks to my deepest fears and also to humanity's deepest fears is being trapped in a world of delusions created by AI

You know, the fear of robots rebelling against humans and shooting people and whatever, this is very new

This goes back a couple of decades, maybe to the mid-20th century

But for thousands of years, humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear

We know that our societies are ultimately based on stories. And there was always the fear that we will just be trapped inside a world of illusions and delusions and fantasies, which we will mistake for reality and will not be able to escape from

That we will lose all touch with truth, with reality. Part of that exists today

Yeah. And, you know, it goes back to the parable of the cave in Plato's philosophy of a group of prisoners chained in a cave facing a blank wall, a screen

And there are shadows projected on this screen and they mistake the shadows for reality

And you have the same fears in ancient Hindu and Buddhist philosophy of the world of Maya, the world of illusions

and AI is kind of the perfect tool to create it. We are already seeing it being created all around us

If the main metaphor of the early internet age was the web, the worldwide web

and the web connects everything, so now the main metaphor is the cocoon

It's the web which closes on us and I live inside one information cocoon

and you live inside maybe a different information cocoon and there is absolutely no way for us to communicate

because we live in separate, different realities. Let me ask you how you think this is going to impact democracies

And let me read you something from the book because I think it speaks to maybe even this election

here in the United States. The definition of democracy as a distributed information network

with strong self-correcting mechanisms stands in sharp contrast to a common misconception

that equates democracy only with elections. Elections are a central part of the democratic

toolkit, but they are not democracy. In the absence of additional self-correcting mechanisms

elections can easily be rigged. Even if the elections are completely free and fair by itself

this too doesn't guarantee democracy. For democracy is not the same thing as

and this one's interesting, majority dictatorship. What do you mean by that

Many things. But, I mean, on the most basic level, we just saw in Venezuela

that you can hold elections, and if the dictator has the power to rig the elections

so it means nothing. The great advantage of democracy is that it corrects itself

It has this mechanism that you try something, the people try something

they vote for a party, for a leader, let's try this bunch of policies for a couple of years

If it doesn't work well, we can now try something else. The basic ability to say we made a mistake

let try something else this is democracy In Putin Russia you cannot say that We made a mistake Let try somebody else In democracy you can But there is a problem here You give so much power for a limited time

you give so much power to a leader, to a party, to enact certain policies. But then what happens

if that leader or party utilizes the power that the people gave them

not to enact a specific time-limited policy, but to gain even more power

and to make it impossible to get rid of them anymore. That was always one of the key problems of democracy

that you can use democracy to gain power and then use the power you have to destroy democracy

Erdogan said it in Turkey, I think, best, that he said democracy is like a tram, like a train

You take it until you reach its destination, then you go down. You don't stay on the train

So that's one key problem that have been haunting democracy for its entire existence, you know, from ancient times until today

And for most of history, large-scale democracy was really impossible because democracy, in essence, is a conversation

between a large number of people. And in the ancient world, you could have this conversation

in a tribe, in a village, in a city-state like Athens or Republican Rome, but you could not have it

in a large kingdom with millions of people because there was no technical means to hold the conversation

So we don't know of any example of a large-scale democracy before the rise of modern information technology in the late modern age

So democracy is built on top of information technology. And when there is a big change in information technology, like what is happening right now in the world, there is an earthquake in the structure built on top of it

Who is supposed to be the arbiter of truth in these democracies

And the reason I raise this issue is we have a big debate going on in this country right now about free speech

Yeah. And how much information we're supposed to know what access to information we're supposed to get

Mark Zuckerberg just came out a couple of weeks ago and said that, you know, there was information during the pandemic that he was suppressing that in retrospect, he wishes now he wasn't suppressing

This gets to the idea of truth, and it also gets the idea of what information

You said information is not truth. Yeah. Are we supposed to get access to all of it and decipher what's real ourselves

Is somebody else supposed to do it for us? And will AI ultimately be that arbiter

So there are a couple of different questions here. One about free speech and the other about who is supposed to

I mean, the most important thing is that free speech includes the freedom to tell lies, to tell fictions, to tell fantasies

So it's not the same as the question of truth. Ideally, in a democracy, you also have the freedom to lie

You also have the freedom to spread fictions. You say ideally? Why is that ideal

Why is it ideal? That's part of freedom of speech. Okay. And this is something that is crucial to understand because the tech giants, they are constantly confusing the question of truth with the question of free speech

And there are two different questions. We don't want a kind of truth police that constantly tells human beings what they can and cannot say

There are, of course, limits even to that, but ideally, yes, people should be able

to also tell fictions and fantasies and so forth. This is information

It's not truth. The crucial role of distilling out of this ocean of information

the rare and costly kind of information which is truth, This is the role of several different, very important institutions in society

This is the role of scientists. This is the role of journalists

This is the role of judges. And the role or the aim of these institutions is, again, it's not to limit the freedom of speech of the people

but to tell us what is the truth. Now, the problem we now face is that there is a sustained attack on these institutions

and on the very notion that there is truth, because the dominant worldview in large parts of both the left and the right

on the left it takes a Marxist shape, and on the right a populist shape

is they tell us that the only reality is power. All the world, all the universe, all reality is just power

The only thing humans want is power. And any human interaction, like we having this conversation

is just a power struggle. And in every such interaction, when somebody tells you something

The question to ask, and this is where Donald Trump meets Karl Marx

and they shake hands. They agree on that. When somebody tells you something, the question to ask is not

is it true? There's no such thing. The question to ask is, who is winning and who is losing

Whose privileges, like what I have just said, whose privileges are being served by it

And the idea is that, again, scientists, journalists, judges, people at large, they are only pursuing power

And this is an extremely cynical and destructive view, which undermines all institutions

Luckily, it's not true. especially when we look at ourselves, if we start to understand humanity

just by looking at ourselves, most people will say, yes, I want some power in life

but it's not the only thing I want. I actually want truth also

I want to know the truth about myself, about my life, the truth about the world

And the reason that there is this deep yearning for truth is that you can't really be happy

if you don't know the truth about yourself and about your life

If you look at these people who are obsessed with power, people like Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump

they have a lot of power. They don't seem to be particularly happy

And when you realize that I'm a human being and I really want to know at least some truth about life

why isn't it true also of others? Yes, there are problems in institutions. There is corruption, there is influence and so on

But this is why we have a lot of different institutions. I'm going to throw another name at you. You talked about Putin. You talked about Trump

You talked about Netanyahu. He's not a politician, but he might want to be at some point

Elon Musk. Where do you put him in this? And the reason I ask, talking about truth and information

he's somebody who said that he wants to set all information free. because he believes that if the information is free, he says

that you, all of us, will be able to find and get to the truth

There are others who believe that all of that information will obscure the truth

I think, again, it's a very naive view of information and truth

The idea that you just open the floodgates and let information flood the world

and the truth will somehow rise to the top. You don't know anything about history if this is what you think

It just doesn't work like that. The truth, again, it's costly. It's rare

Like if you want to write a true story in a newspaper or an academic paper or whatever

you have to research so much. It's very difficult. It takes a lot of time, energy, money

If you want to create some fiction, it's the easiest thing in the world. Similarly, the truth is often very complicated because reality is very complicated

Whereas fiction and fantasy can be made as simple as possible. And people, in most cases, they like simple stories

And the truth is often painful. Whether you think about the truth about entire countries or the truth about individuals, the truth is often unattractive

It's painful. We don't want to know, for instance, the pain that we inflict sometimes on people in our life or on ourselves

Because the truth is costly and it's complicated and it can be painful, in a completely kind of free fight, it will lose

This is why we need institutions like newspapers or like academic institutions

And again, something very important about the tech giants, my problem with Facebook and Twitter and so forth, I don't expect them to censor their users

We have to be very, very careful about censoring the expression of real human beings

My problem is their algorithms. Even when they're telling untruths. Even when they're telling untruths

Even when they're not telling the truth. to be very careful about censoring the free expression of human beings

My problem is with the algorithms. That if you look at a historical case

like the massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar in 2016, 2017, in which thousands of people were murdered

tens of thousands were raped, and hundreds of thousands were expelled and are still refugees in Bangladesh and elsewhere

This ethnic cleansing campaign was fueled by a propaganda campaign that generated intense hatred among Buddhist Burmese in Myanmar against the Rohingya

Now, this campaign, to a large extent, took place on Facebook. And the Facebook algorithms played a very central role in it

Now, whenever these accusations have been made, and they have been made by Amnesty and the United Nations and so forth

Facebook basically said, but we don't want to censor the free expression of people

That all these conspiracy theories about the Rohingya, that they are all terrorists and they want to destroy us

they were created by human beings. And who are we, Facebook, to censor them

And the problem there is that the role of the algorithms was, at that point, was not in creating the stories

It was in disseminating, in spreading particular stories. Because people in Myanmar were creating a lot of different kinds of content in 2016, 2017

there were hate-filled conspiracy theories, but there were also sermons on compassion

and cooking lessons and biology lessons and so much content. And in the battle for human attention

what will get the attention of the users in Myanmar? The algorithms were the kingmakers

And the algorithms were given by Facebook a clear and simple goal

Increase user engagement. Keep more people, more time on the platform, because this is the basis for what still is for Facebook's business model

Now, the algorithms, and this goes back to AIs that make decisions by themselves

and invent ideas by themselves. Nobody in Facebook wanted there to be an ethnic cleansing campaign

Most of them did not know anything about Myanmar and what was happening there

They just told the algorithms increase user engagement. And the algorithms experimented on millions of human guinea pigs

And they discovered that if you press the hate button and the fear button in a human mind

you keep that human glued to the screen. So they deliberately started spreading hate-filled conspiracy theories

and not cooking lessons or sermons on compassion. And this is the expectation

Don't censor the users. But if your algorithms deliberately spread hate and fear

because this is your business model, it's on you. This is your fault

Okay, but here I'm going to make it more complicated. I'm going to make it more complicated. And the reason we're talking about Facebook and Elon Musk

is that the algorithms that are effectively building these new AI agents

are scraping all of this information off of these sites, this human user-generated content which we've decided everybody should be able to see

except once the AIs see it, they will see the conspiracy theories

They will see the misinformation. And the question is how the AI agent will ever learn what's real and what's not

That is a very, very old question. You know, the editor of the New York Times, the editor of the Wall Street Journal

have dealt with this question before. Why do we need to start again as if there has never been any history

Like the question, there is so much information out there. How should I know what's true or not

People have been there before If you run Twitter or Facebook you are running one of the biggest media companies in the world So take a look at what media companies have been dealing with in previous generations and previous centuries

Do you think they should be liable for what's on their sites right now? The tech companies

The tech companies should be liable for the user-generated content. No, they should be liable for the actions of their algorithms

If their algorithms decided to put at the top of the news feed a hate-filled conspiracy theory

it's on them, not on the person who created the conspiracy theory in the first place

The same way that, you know, like the chief editor of the New York Times decided to put a hate-filled conspiracy theory at the top of the first page of the New York Times

And when you come and tell them, what have you done? They say, I haven't done anything

I didn't write it. I just decided to put it on the front page of the New York Times

That's all. That's a huge thing. Editors have a lot more power than the authors who create the content

It's very cheap to create content. The really key point is what gets the attention

You know, I'll give you an example from thousands of years ago. that when Christianity began

there were so many stories circulating about Jesus and about the disciples and about the saints

Anybody could invent a story and say, Jesus said it. And there was no Bible

There was no New Testament in the time of Jesus or 100 years after Jesus

or even 200 years after Jesus. There are lots and lots of stories and texts and parables

At a certain point, the leaders of the Christian church in the 4th century

they said, this cannot go on like this. We have to have some order in this flood of information

How would Christians know what information to value, which texts to read

and what are forgeries or whatever that they should just ignore? And they had two church councils in Hippo and in Carthage, today in Tunisia

in the late 4th century, and this is where they didn't write the texts. The texts were written

generations previously by so many different people. They decided what will get into the Bible

and what will stay out. The book didn't come down from heaven in its common complete form

There was a committee that decided which of all the texts will get in

And for instance, they decided that a text which claimed to be written by St. Paul

but many scholars today believe that it wasn't written by St. Paul, the first epistle to Timothy, which was a very misogynistic text

which said basically that the role of women is to be silent and to bear children

This got into the Bible. Whereas another text, the Acts of Paul and Thecla

which portrayed Thecla as a disciple of St. Paul, preaching and leading the Christian community and doing miracles and so forth

they said, nah, let's leave that one out. And the views of billions of Christians for almost 2,000 years

about women and their capacities and their role in the church and in the community

It was decided not by the authors of 1 Timothy and the Acts of Paul and Thecla

but by this church committee who sat in what is today Tunisia

and went over all these things and decided this will be in and this will be out

This is enormous power, the power of curation, the editorial power. You know, you think about the role of newspapers in modern politics

It's the editors who have the most power. Lenin, before he was dictator of the Soviet Union, his one job was chief editor of Iskra

And Mussolini also. First he was a journalist, then he was editor

Immense power. And now the editors increasingly are the algorithms. You know, I'm here partly on a book tour, and I know that my number one customer is the algorithm

Like, if I can get the algorithm to recommend my book, the humans will follow

So it's an immense power. How are you planning to do that

That's above my pay grade. I mean, I'm just sitting here on the stage talking with you

There is a whole team that decides, oh, we'll do this, we'll do that, we will put it like this

But seriously, again, when you realize the immense power of the recommendation algorithm, the editor, this comes with responsibility

So again, I don't think that we should hold Twitter or Facebook responsible for what their users write

And we should be very careful about censoring users. Even when they write lies

But we should hold the companies responsible for the choices and the decisions of their algorithms

You talk now about Lenin and we've talked about all sorts of dictators

One of the things you talk about in the book is the prospect that AI could be used to turn a democracy into totalitarian state

Which I thought was fascinating because it would really require AI to cocoon all of us in a unique way, telling some kind of story that captures an entire country

How would that work in your mind? Again, we don't see reality

We see the information that we are exposed to. And if you have better technology to create and to control information, you have a much more powerful technology to control humans

Previously, there was always limitations to how much a central authority could control what people see and think and do

Even if you think about the most Tolitovian regimes of the 20th century, like the USSR or Nazi Germany, they couldn't really follow everybody all the time

It was technically impossible. Like if you have 200 million Soviet citizens, to follow them around all the time, 24 hours a day, you need about 400 million KGB agents

Because even KGB agents, they need to sleep sometimes. They need to eat sometimes

They need two shifts. So 200 million citizens, you need 400 million agents

You don't have 400 million KGB agents. Even if you had, you still have a bigger problem

Because let's say that two agents follow each citizen 24 hours a day

What do they do in the end? They write a report. This is like 1940 or 1960

It's paper. They write a paper report. So every day KGB headquarters in Moscow is flooded with 200 million reports about each citizen Where they went what they read who they met Somebody needs to yze all that information Where do they get the ysts

It's absolutely impossible, which is why even in the Soviet Union, privacy was still the default

You never knew who is watching and who is listening, but most of the time, nobody was watching and listening

And even if they were, most likely the report about you would be buried in some place in the archives of the KGB and nobody would ever read it

Now both problems of surveillance are solved by AI. To follow all the people of a country 24 hours a

day, you do not need millions of human agents. You have all these digital agents, the smartphones

the computers, the microphones, and so forth. You can put the whole population under 24-hour

surveillance. And you don't need human ysts to yze all the information. You have AIs to do

it. What do you make of the idea that an entire generation has given up on the idea of privacy

Right? We all put our pictures on Instagram and Facebook and all of these sites. We hear about a

security hack at some website and we go back the next day and try to buy and put our credit card

on the same site again. We say that we're very anxious about privacy

We love to tell people how anxious we are about the privacy. And then we do things

that are the complete opposite. Because there is immense pressure on us

to do them. Part of it is despair. And people still cherish privacy

And part of the problem is that we haven't seen the consequences yet

Yet. Yet. we will see them quite soon. It's like this huge experiment conducted on billions of human guinea

pigs, but we still haven't seen the consequences of this annihilation of privacy. And it is

extremely, extremely dangerous. Again, going back to the freedom of speech issue, part of this

crisis of freedom of speech is the erosion of the difference between private and public

that there is a big difference if just the two of us are sitting alone somewhere talking just you and me

or if there is an entire audience and it's public. Now, I'm a very big believer in the right to stupidity

People have a right to be stupid in private. That when you talk in private with your best friends, with your family, whatever

you have a right to be really stupid. to be offensive. As a gay person, I would say that even politicians, if they tell homophobic jokes

in a private situation with their friends, this is none of my business. And it's actually good

that politicians would have a situation where they can just relax and say the first stupid

thing that pops up in their mind. This should not happen in public. Now it's going to be entered

into the algorithm. Yes. And this inability to know what that anything I say, even in private

can now go viral. So there is no difference. And this is extremely harmful. Part of what's

happening now in the world is this kind of tension between organic animals, we are organic animals

and an inorganic digital system, which is increasingly controlling and shaping the entire world

Now, part of being an organic entity is that you live by cycles

day and night, winter and summer, growth and decay. Sometimes you're active

Sometimes you need to relax. You need to rest. Now, algorithms and AIs and computers, they are not organic

They never need rest. They are on all the time. And the big question is whether we adapt to them or they adapt to us

And more and more, of course, we have to adapt to them. We have to be on all the time

So the news cycle is always on. And everything we say, even when we are supposedly relaxing with friends, it can be public

So the whole of life becomes like this one long job interview

that any stupid thing you did in some college party when you were 18

it can meet you down the road 10, 20 years later. And this is destructive to how we function

You even think about the market. Like Wall Street, as far as I know, it's open Monday to Fridays

9.30 to 4 in the afternoon. Like if on Friday, at five minutes past four

a new war erupts in the Middle East, the market will react only on Monday

It is still running by organic cycles. Now, what would happen to human bankers and financiers and what is happening when the market is always active

You can never relax. We've got some questions, I think, that are going to come out here on cards, which I want to ask in just a moment

I have a couple of questions before we get to them. One is, have you talked to folks like Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, or the folks at Microsoft

I know Bill Gates was a big fan of your books in the past. or the folks at Google

What do they say when you discuss this with them? And do you trust them

As humans, when you've met them, do you go, I trust you, Sam Altman

Most of them are afraid. Afraid of you or afraid of AI

Yeah, afraid of what they are doing, afraid of what is happening. They understand better than anybody else

the potential, including the destructive potential of what they are creating. and they are very afraid of it

At the same time, their basic shtick is that I'm a good guy

and I'm very concerned about it. Now you have these other guys, they are bad

they don't have the same kind of responsibility that I have, so it would be very bad for humanity if they create it first

so I must be the one who creates it first, and you can trust me that I will know

I will at least do my best to keep it under control. And everybody is saying it

And I think that to some extent, they are genuine about it. There is, of course, also this, another element in there of extreme kind of pride and hebris

that they are doing the most important thing in basically not just the history of humanity, the history of life

You think they are? They could be, yes. If you think about the timeline of the universe, at least as far as we know it

So you have basically two stops. First stop four billion years ago

the first organic life forms emerge on planet Earth. And then for four billion years, nothing major happens

Like for four million years, it's more of the same. It's more organic stuff. So you have amoebas and you have dinosaurs and you have humans

but it's all organic. And then here comes Elon Musk or Sam Altman And that the second important thing in the history of the universe the beginning of inorganic evolution

Because AI is just at the very, very beginning of its evolutionary process

It's basically like 10 years old, 15 years old. We haven't seen anything yet

GPT-4 and all these things, they are the amoebas of AI evolution

and who knows how the AI dinosaurs are going to look like

But the name on the inflection point of the history of the universe

if that name is Elon Musk or that name is Sam Altman, that's a big thing

We've got a bunch of really great questions, and actually one of them is where I wanted to go before we even got to these

so we'll just go straight to it. It's actually a bit of a right turn of a question

given the conversation that you mentioned Netanyahu on point. So the question here on the card says you're Israeli

Do you really think that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is solvable? And I thought actually that was an important question

because it actually touches on some of these larger issues that you've raised about humanity

So on one level, absolutely, yes. It's not like one of these kind of mathematical problems

that we have a mathematical proof that there is no solution to this problem

No, there are solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it's not a conflict about objective reality

It's not a conflict about land or food or resources. You say, okay, there is just not enough food

somebody has to starve to death. Or there is not enough land, somebody has to be thrown in the sea

This is not the case. There is enough food between the Mediterranean and Jordan to feed everybody

There is enough energy. There is even enough land. Yes, it's a very crowded place, but technically

there is enough space to build houses and synagogues and mosques and factories and hospitals

and schools for everybody. So there is no objective shortage. But you have people each in their own

information cocoon, each with their own mass delusion, each with their own fantasy

basically denying either the existence of the other side or the right of the other side to exist

And the war is basically an attempt to make the other side disappear. Like my mind

has no space in it. It's not that the land has no space for the people

My mind has no space in it for the other people, so I will try to make them disappear

The same way they don't exist in my mind, they also must not exist in reality

And this is on both sides. And again, it's not an objective problem

It's a problem of what is inside the minds of people. And therefore, there is a solution to it

Unfortunately, there is no motivation. What is the solution? For someone who grew up there, who's lived there, you're not there right now, right

I'm here right now. You're here right now. Again, if you go back, say, to the two-state solution, it's a completely workable solution in objective terms

and you can divide the land and you can divide the resources so that side by side

you have a Palestinian state and you have an Israel and they are both, they both exist and

they are both viable and they both provide security and prosperity and dignity to their

citizens, to their inhabitants. So how would you, how would you do that though? Because part of the

part of the issue is, is a chicken and egg issue here. It seems like where the Israelis or Netanyahu

would say, look, unless we are fully secure and we feel completely good about our security

we can't really even entertain a conversation just about anything else. Right. And the Palestinians on the other side effectively say the opposite, which is to say

that you need to solve our issues here. The problem is that both sides are right

Each side thinks that the other side is trying to annihilate it and both are right

And both are right. But that's a problem if both are right. This is the problem, yes

The place to start, again, is basically in our minds. It's very difficult to change the minds of other people

The first crucial step is to say these other people, they exist, and they have a right to exist

The issue is that both sides suspect that they don't think that we should exist

Any compromise they would make is just because they are now a bit weak

So they are willing to compromise on something, but deep in their hearts, they think we should not exist

So that sooner or later, when they are stronger, when they have the opportunity, they will destroy us

And again, this is correct. This is what is in the hearts and minds of both sides

So the place to start is to, you know, inside first our heads come to recognize that the other side exists and it has a right to exist

That even if someday we'll have the power to completely annihilate them, we shouldn't do it because they have a right to exist

And this is something we can do for us. Let me ask you a question. I think people in Israel would say that people in Palestine have a right to exist

Okay. There is a, you don't believe that, you think that's not the case

Unfortunately, for a significant percentage of the citizens of Israel, and certainly of the members of the present governing coalition, this is not the case

And you think they have no right to exist? Because I was going to say, they would say that they feel that the Palestinians want to annihilate them

And do you believe that? Yes. Again, they think that the Palestinians want to annihilate us, and they are right

They do want to annihilate us. But also, again, I would say, I don't have the numbers to give you

but a significant part of the Israeli public and a very significant part of the current ruling coalition in Israel

Well, they want to drive the Palestinian completely from the land. Again, maybe they say we are now too weak, so we can't do it

We have to compromise. We have only to do a little bit. But ultimately, this is what they really think and want

And at least some members of the coalition are completely open about it

And their messianic fantasy, they actually want a bigger and bigger war

they want to set the entire Middle East on fire, because they think that when the smoke would clear

yes, there will be hundreds of thousands of casualties, it will be very difficult, it will be terrible

but in the end, we'll have the entire land to ourselves, and there will not be any more Palestinians between

the Mediterranean and the Jordan. Let me ask you one other very political question as it relates to this

and then actually we have a great segue back into our conversation about AI as it happens

Politically, here in the U.S., we have an election, and there's some very interesting questions about how former President Trump

if he were to become the president, would be good or bad for Israel

I think there's a perception that he would be good for Israel. You may disagree. And what you think Vice President Harris, if she was the president, would be good or bad for Israel or good or bad for the Palestinians

How do you see that? And I can't predict what each will decide, but it's very clear that President Trump is undermining the global order

He's in favor of chaos. He is in favor of destroying the liberal global order that we had for the previous couple of decades

and which provided with all the problems, with all the difficulties, the most peaceful era in human history

And when you destroy order and you have no alternative, what you get is chaos

And I don't think that chaos is good for Israel or that chaos is good for the Jews, for the Jewish people

And this is why I think that it will be very, even from a very kind of transactional, very narrow perspective

you know, America is a long, long way from Israel, from the Middle East

and isolationist America that withdraws from the world order is not good news for Israel

So what do you say to the, there are a number of American Jews who say, and I'm Jewish

and this is not something that I say, but I hear it constantly. They say

Trump would be good for the Jews. Trump would be good for Israel. He would protect Israel

In what way? he would have a open checkbook and send military arms and everything that was asked

no questions as long as it serves his interests and if at a particular point it serves his

interests to make a deal with putin or with iran or with anybody at israel's expense he will do it

Fair enough. I mean, he's not committed. I asked the question to provoke an answer

Let me ask you this, and this is a great segue back into the conversation we've been having with the last hour

You've written about how humans have evolved to pursue power and knowledge, but power, I think, is the big focus

How does the pursuit of happiness fit into the narrative? And I don't think that humans are kind of obsessed only with power

I think that power is a relatively superficial thing in the human condition

It's a means to achieve various ends. It's not necessarily bad. It's not that power is always bad

No, it can be used for good. It can be used for bad. But the deep motivation of humans, I think, is the pursuit of happiness

and the pursuit of truth, which are related to one another because you can never really be happy

if you don't know the truth about yourself, about your life. Unfortunately, as often happens

the means becomes an end. That people become obsessed with power not with what they can do with it So very often they have immense power and they don know what to do with it or they do with it very bad things

This is an interesting one. What are some arguments for and against a future

in which humans no longer have relationships with other humans and only have relationships with AI

One thing to say about it is that AI is becoming better and better at understanding our feelings, our emotions, and therefore of developing relationships and intimate relationships with us

Because there is a deep yearning in human beings to be understood. We always want people to understand us, to understand how we feel

We want my husband, my parents, my teachers, my boss to understand how I feel

And very often we are disappointed. They don't understand how I feel

partly because they are too preoccupied with their own feelings to care about my feelings

AIs will not have this problem. They don't have any feelings of their own

and they can be 100% focused on deciphering, on yzing your feelings

So, you know, in all these science fiction movies in which the robots are extremely cold and mechanical

and they can't understand the most basic human emotion, it's the complete opposite

Part of the issue we are facing is that they will be so good

at understanding human emotions and reacting in a way which is exactly calibrated

to your personality at this particular moment that we might become exasperated with the human beings who don't have this capacity

to understand our emotions and to react in such a calibrated way

There is a very big question, which we didn't deal with, it's a long question, of whether AIs will develop emotions, feelings of their own

whether they become conscious or not. At present, we don't see any sign of it

But even if AIs don't develop any feelings of their own, once we become emotionally attached to them, it is likely that we would start treating them as conscious entities, as sentient beings, and we'll confer on them the legal status of persons

In the US, there is actually a legal path already open for that

Corporations, according to US law, are legal persons. They have rights. They have freedom of speech, for instance

Now, you can incorporate an AI. When you incorporate a corporation like Google or Facebook or whatever

until today, this was to some extent just make-believe. because all the decisions of the corporations

had to be made by human beings, by the executives, the lawyers, the accountants

What happens if you incorporate an AI, it's now a legal person

and it can make decisions by itself. It doesn't need any human team to run it

So you start having legal persons, let's say in the US, which are not human

and in many ways are more intelligent than us, and they can start making money

For instance, going on TaskRabbit and offering their services to various things

like writing texts, so they earn money. And then they go to the market

they go to Wall Street and they invest that money And because they so intelligent maybe they make billions And so you have a situation in which perhaps the richest person in the U is not a human being

And part of their rights is that they have, under the freedom of speech, the right to make

political contributions. So this AI person can contribute billions of dollars to some candidate in exchange for getting more rights to AIs

So there'll be an AI president. I'm hoping you're going to leave all of us maybe on a high note here with something optimistic

Here's the question. And it's my final question. Humans are not always able to think from other perspectives

Is AI able to think from multiple perspectives? I think the answer is yes

But do you think that AI will actually help us think this way

That's one of the positive scenarios about AI, that they will help us understand ourselves better

That their immense power will be used not to manipulate us, but to help us

And we have historical precedents for that. Like we have relationships with humans like doctors, like lawyers, accountants, therapists that know a lot of things about us

Some of like our most private information is held by these people

and they have a fiduciary duty to use our private information and their expertise to help us

And this is not, you don't need to invent the wheel. This is already there. And it's obvious that if they use it to manipulate us

or if they sell it to a third party to manipulate us

this is basically against the law. They can go to prison for that. And we should have the same thing with AI

And we talked a lot about the dangers of AI, but obviously AI has enormous positive potential

Otherwise, we would not be developing it. It could provide us with the best healthcare in history

It could prevent most car accidents. It can also, you know, you can have armies of AI doctors and teachers and therapists who help us, including help us understand our own humanity

our own relationships, our own emotions better. This can happen if we make the right decisions

in the next few years. I would end maybe by saying that, again, it's not that we lack the power

At the present moment, what we lack is the understanding and the attention

This is potentially the biggest technological revolution in history, and it's moving extremely

fast. That's the key problem. It's just moving extremely fast. If you think about the U.S

elections, the coming U.S. elections, so whoever wins the elections over the next four years

some of the most important decisions they will have to make would be about AIs and regulating

AIs and AI safety and so forth. And it's not one of the main issues in the presidential debates

it's not even clear what is the difference, if there is one

between Republicans and Democrats on AI. So on specific issues, we start seeing differences

when it comes to issues of freedom of speech and regulation and so forth. But about the broader question

it not clear at all And again the biggest danger of all is that we will just rush forward without thinking

and without developing the mechanisms to slow down or to stop if necessary

You know, if you think about it like a car. So when they taught me how to drive a car, the first thing I learned is how to use the brakes

That's the first thing I think they teach most people. Only after you know how to use the brakes

they teach you how to use the fuel pedal, the accelerator. And it's the same when you learn how to ski

I never learned how to ski, but people who had told me. The first thing they tell you is how to stop or how to fall

It's a bad idea to first teach you how to kind of, okay, go faster

And then when you're down the slope, they start shouting, okay, this is how you stop

And this is what we are doing with AI. Like you have this chorus of people in places like Silicon Valley

Let's go as fast as we can. If there is a problem down the road, we'll figure it out, how to stop

That's very, very dangerous. Yuval, before you go, let me ask you one final, final question, and it's news we could all use

You are writing this whole book about AI and technology, and you do not carry a smartphone

Is this true? I have a kind of emergency smartphone because of various services

How does your whole life work? But I don't carry it with me. I told you, you do not carry a phone

You don't have an email, the whole thing. No, I have email. You have email. And I try to use technology, but not to be used by it

And part of the answer is that I have a team who is carrying the smartphone and doing all that for me

So it's not so fair to say that I don't have it

But I think on a bigger issue, what we can say, it's a bit like with food

That 100 years ago, food was scarce. So people ate whatever they could

And if they found something full of sugar and fat, they ate as much of it as possible because it gave you a lot of energy

And now we are flooded by enormous amounts of food and junk food, which is artificially pumped full of fat and sugar and is creating immense health problems

And most people have realized that more food is not always good for me and that I need to have some kind of diet

And it's exactly the same with information. We need an information diet

that previously information was scarce, so we consumed whatever we could find

Now we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and much of it is junk information

which is artificially filled with hatred and greed and fear. And we basically need to go on an information diet

and consume less information and be far more mindful about what we put inside

that information is the food for the mind, and you feed your mind with unhealthy information

you'll have a sick mind. It's as simple as that. Well, we want to thank you, Bala

Add Nexus to your information diet, because it's an important document about our future and our world

I want to thank you for this fascinating conversation. Thank you, and thank you for all your questions

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