Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Unstoppable Us. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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TRANSCRIPT:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:24 - Intelligence
20:19 - Origin of humans
30:41 - Suffering
51:22 - Hitler
1:09:54 - Benjamin Netanyahu
1:28:17 - Peace in Ukraine
1:45:07 - Conspiracy theories
1:59:46 - AI safety
2:14:04 - How to think
2:23:47 - Advice for young people
2:26:28 - Love
2:36:38 - Mortality
2:41:02 - Meaning of life

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If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions, created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs.

The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current right-wing government in Israel.

So while Much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization.

We also discuss the political turmoil of present day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's your Val Noah Harari.

billion years ago is the origin of our universe.

3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the 1 we call Earth.

Let's say 200, 000 years ago is the appearance of early Homo sapiens.

How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time?

Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe?

I suppose there should be some, statistically, but we don't have any evidence.

But I do think that Intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued.

We are the most intelligent entities on this planet, and look what we're doing.

So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.

So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence?

Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness.

I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry tend to miss.

Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals, and to win a chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease.

Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate.

In humans and other animals, Intelligence and consciousness go together.

They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them.

We solve problems, we attain goals by having feelings.

But other types of intelligence, Certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent, and as far as we know, they have 0 consciousness.

When a computer beats you at chess or Go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy.

And there could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have 0 consciousness.

And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.

Can you still make on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected?

So not just in humans, but anywhere else.

Again, we have examples, certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness.

As far as we know, plants are not conscious, yet they are intelligent.

They can solve problems, they can attain goals in very sophisticated ways.

The other way around, to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably impossible.

But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible.

A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry.

We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms.

Whether you're an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry.

Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness?

Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon?

Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious?

But again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness.

Can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic?

I mean, we have to take both options into account.

Well, a big part of that is, do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings?

Another way to ask that, is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them.

Meaning, are we very human-centric in our understanding of 1, the definition of life, 2, the definition of intelligence, and 3, the definition of consciousness?

The aliens are here, they are just not from outer space.

AI, which usually stands for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien type of intelligence.

It solves problems, attains goals in a very, very different way, in an alien way from human beings.

Yeah, I'm not implying that AI came from outer space.

It came from Silicon Valley, but it is alien to us.

If there are alien, intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space already here, I've not seen any evidence for it.

It's not impossible, but in science, evidence is everything.

Well, I mean, I guess instructive there's just having the humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale, a different spatial scale.

And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence.

It's possible that even the language models, the larger language models we have today are already conscious.

I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms.

Because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves.

We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it.

We have direct access to our subjective consciousness.

We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world, any other human being, our parents, our best friends, We don't have proof that they are conscious.

You know, this has been known for thousands of years.

This is Descartes, this is Buddha, this is Plato.

It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious.

Most people who have pets, our family believe that their pets are conscious, but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs.

Now pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats, according to many measures.

Yet when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pigment, you don't think about it as a conscious entity.

Why do you think of your dog as conscious but not of the bacon that you buy?

Because you've built a relationship with the dog and you don't have a relationship with the bacon.

Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness.

Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity, when you are invested in it emotionally, you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious.

And when it comes again to AI and computers, I don't think that at the present moment, computers are conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs and are therefore almost irresistible.

They are compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities.

And I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take this into account.

That even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point, the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of this social convention.

What to you is a social convention, just a funny little side effect, a little artifact, or is it fundamental to what consciousness is?

Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans, and therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours?

We are design, again, you know, all this argument between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design.

As far as the past go, all entities evolved by natural selection.

The funny thing is, but when you look to the future, more and more entities will come out of intelligent design, not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds, they will design more and more entities.

It is designed to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans.

And in many ways, it's already doing it almost better than human beings in some situations.

You know, when 2 people talk with 1 another, 1 of the things that kind of makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions.

You're saying something, and I'm not really listening to you because there is something I want to say, and I'm just waiting until you finish, I can put in a word.

Or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever that I don't pay attention to what you're feeling.

This is 1 of the biggest obstacles in human relationships.

And computers don't have this problem because they don't have any emotions of their own.

So, you know, when a computer is talking to you, it can be the most, it can focus 100% of its attention is on what you're saying and what you're feeling because it has no feelings of its own.

And paradoxically, this means that computers can fool people into feeling that, oh, there is a conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side, because the 1 thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all their attention on me.

Like I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians.

And now you have this entity, which 100% of its attention is just on what I feel.

And this is a huge, huge temptation, and I think also a huge, huge danger.

Well, the interesting catch 22 there is, you said somebody to listen to us.

Yes, we want somebody to listen to us, but for us to respect that somebody, they sometimes have to also not listen.

It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes.

They have to have self-importance and confidence, and we should have a little bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment.

There should be a little bit of that tension.

that if social scientists and psychologists establish that, I don't know, 17% inattention is good for a conversation, because then you feel challenged, oh, I need to grab this person's attention.

You can program the AI to have exactly 17% inattention, not 1 percentage more or less, or it can, by trial and error, discover what is the ideal percentage.

Again, you can create, over the last 10 years, we have creating machines for grabbing people's attention.

This is what has been happening on social media.

Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which in many ways is much, much more dangerous and scary.

Already the machines for grabbing attention, we've seen how much social and political damage they could do by in many ways kind of distorting the public conversation.

Machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships, this is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction.

If we don't regulate it, if we don't train ourself to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society.

Well, 1 of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized and instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistants that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better.

I mean, just even interactions with large language models now, if you ask them questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information.

It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides.

So it just feels like that's a, the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues, to say these are the different theories, these are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but that here's the kind of backing for those conspiracies.

It just lays it all out with a calm language, without the words that kind of presume there's some kind of manipulation going on underneath it all.

Of course, those are the early days, and people can step in and start to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there, as opposed to what's currently happening is kind of, the internet is input, compress it, and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues.

So I mean, there's a lot of promise there also, right?

Absolutely, I mean, if there was no promise, promise, there was no problem.

You know, If this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it.

Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described, in better medicine, better health care, better education, so many promises.

But this is also why it's so dangerous, because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there, and it has some dangerous potential also.

Again, I'm not advocating banning it, just to be careful about how we, not so much develop it, but most importantly, how we deploy it into the public sphere.

And you look back at history, and 1 of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies.

I hear many people now say, you know, AI, we've been here before.

We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the Industrial Revolution.

Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it will take jobs and build up bad actors, and in the end, it's okay.

And as a historian, my tendency is, yes, in the end, it's okay, but in the end, there is a learning curve.

There is a lot of failed experiments on the way to learning how to use the new technology.

And these failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

If you think about the last really big revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies.

But on the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by the Industrial Revolution.

It was a question of how do you build an industrial society?

Oh, you build an empire, and you take, you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets, and then you had communism.

Another big experiment on how to build an industrial society.

And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry.

And we had all these failed experiments on the way.

And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century, with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species.

So as a historian, when people talk about the examples from history, from new technologies, I'm not so optimistic.

We need to think about the failed experiment which accompanied every major new technology.

So this intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword.

Is that every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us.

And it's unclear each time which will happen.

And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.

Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things.

Each time it does both good things and bad things.

And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes.

Now we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors, of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations.

So when we look back, we say in the end, everything was okay, hey,

But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they are just not here.

And okay has a lot of possible variations to it because there's a lot of suffering along the way even for the people that survived.

But let's actually go back there with deep gratitude to our ancestors.

How did Homo sapiens outcompete the others, the other human-like species, the Neanderthals and the other Homo species?

You know, on the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them.

Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us.

And not just other human species, other animals too.

If you compare me personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better, many other things worse.

If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the 1 that comes successful.

If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to Optimus the robot.

And the chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching with their fingers.

They can only do this kind of pinching and this kind of pinching is very useful for fine manipulation of precise manipulation of objects.

No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp.

But you know, if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee, you

This won't help you against a chimpanzee.

And similarly, if you want to climb a tree, if you want to do so many things, my bets will be on the chimp, not on Elon.

So, I mean, you have advantages on both sides.

And what really made us successful, What made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability, but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers.

Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say 50 chimpanzees, 100 chimpanzees.

As far as we can tell from archaeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals.

Homo sapiens, about 70, 000 years ago, gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers.

You start seeing the formation of large networks, political, commercial, religious, items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, artistic fashions.

Chimpanzees, Neanderthals, can cooperate, say, a hundred.

We, you know, now the global trade network has 8000000000 people.

Like what we eat, what we wear, it comes from the other side of the world.

Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people.

Even Israel, which is a relatively small country, say 9 million citizens, that's more than the entire population of the planet 10, 000 years ago of humans.

So we can build these huge networks of cooperation and everything we've accomplished as a species from building the pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that.

And then you ask, okay, so what makes it possible for millions of people who don't know each other to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't?

And at least my answer is stories, is fiction.

If you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis.

It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together.

It's most obvious in cases like religion.

You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts.

Humans believe these stories, which is why we have these huge religious networks.

But it's the same thing with modern politics.

People think, oh, economics, this is rational.

It has nothing to do with fictional stories.

Money is the most successful story ever told, much more successful than any religious mythology.

Not everybody believes in God or in the same God.

Everybody, almost everybody, believes in money, even though it's just a figment of our imagination.

You know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value.

You can't eat them, you can't drink them.

And today, most dollars are not even pieces of paper.

They are just electronic information passing between computers.

We value them just for 1 reason, that you have the best storytellers in the world.

The bankers, the finance ministers, all these people, They are the best storytellers ever.

And they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information, it is worth a banana.

And as long as everybody believes it, it works.

So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently useful and effective and improving the global quality of life, does it become like accepted reality?

Like there's a threshold which is just kind

of- If enough people believe it, it's like with money.

You know, if you start a new cryptocurrency, if you're the only 1 that believes the story—I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course, but ultimately it's storytelling.

If nobody believes your story, you don't have anything.

But if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.

I mean, you can't eat it, you can't drink it, it's nothing.

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Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #390