Yuval Noah Harari, macro-historian, Professor, best-selling author of "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus," and one of the world's most innovative and exciting thinkers, discusses his newest work, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century."

Described as a “truly mind-expanding” journey through today’s most pressing issues, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" reminds us to maintain our collective focus in the midst of dizzying and disorienting change. 

Moderated by Wilson White.

Get the book: https://goo.gl/CVDJzG

Visit Yuval Noah Harari's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/YuvalNoahHarari

Good afternoon, everyone, especially for those of you who are here in California.

My name is Wilson White, and I'm on the Public Policy and Government Relations team here in California.

We have an exciting talk for you today as part of our Talks at Google series, as well as a series of conversations we're having around AI ethics and technology ethics more generally.

So today I'm honored to have Professor Yuval Noah Harari with us.

Yuval is an Israeli historian and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He is a dynamic speaker, thinker, and now an international best-selling author.

We're gonna talk about each of those books today.

The first book he published in 2014, Sapien, which explored some of our history as humans.

His second book in 2016 had an interesting take on our future as humans, Homo Deus.

And then recently he published a new book, The 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which attempts to grapple with some of the issues, the pressing issues that we are facing today.

So we'll talk about some of the themes in each of those books as we go through our conversation.

But collectively, his writings explore very big concepts, like free will and consciousness and intelligence.

So we'll have a lot to explore with Yuval today.

So with that, please join me in welcoming Professor Yuval to Google.

Before getting started, I have to say that when the announcement went out across Google about this talk, I got several e-mails from many Googlers around the world who told me that they had either read or are currently reading 1 or multiple of your books.

So, if you are contemplating a fourth book, maybe on the afterlife, No spoilers during this conversation.

I want to start with maybe some of the themes in both your current book with 21 Lessons as well as Homo Deus.

I have 2 daughters, a five-year-old and a three-year-old.

And the future that you paint in Homo Deus is interesting.

So I'd like to ask you, what should I be teaching my daughters?

That nobody knows how the world would look like in 2050 except that it will be very different from today.

So the most important things to emphasize in education are things like emotional intelligence and mental stability because the 1 thing that they will need for sure is the ability to reinvent themselves repeatedly throughout their lives.

It's really the first time in history that we don't really know what particular skills to teach young people because we just don't know in what kind of world they will be living.

But we do know they will have to reinvent themselves.

And especially if you think about something like the job market, maybe the greatest problem they will face will be psychological.

Because at least beyond a certain age, it's very, very difficult for people to reinvent themselves.

I mean, if previously, if traditionally, people built identities like stone houses with very deep foundations, now it makes more sense to build identities like tents that you can fold and move elsewhere.

Because we don't know where you will have to move, but you will have to move.

So I may have to go back to school now to learn these things so that I can teach the next generation of humans here.

In 21 lessons for the 21st century, you tackle several themes that even we at Google, as a company who are on the leading edge of technology and how technology is being deployed in society, We wrestle with some of the same issues.

Tell me a bit about your thoughts on why democracy is in crisis.

That's a theme in the current book, and I want to explore that a bit.

Why you think liberal democracy, as we knew it, is currently in crisis.

Well, the entire liberal democratic system is built on philosophical ideas we've inherited from the 18th century, especially the idea of free will, which underlies the basic mottos of the liberal worldview, like the voter knows best, the customer is always right, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, follow your heart, do what feels good.

All these liberal mottos, which are the foundation of our political and economic system, they assume that the ultimate authority is the free choices of individuals.

I mean, there are, of course, all kinds of Limitations and boundary cases and so forth but when push comes to shove for instance in the economic field Then corporations will tend to retreat behind this last line of defense That this is what the customers want The customer is always right if the customer is wanted it can't be wrong Who are you to tell the customers that they are wrong?

Now, of course, there are many exceptions, but this is the basics of the free market.

This is the first and last thing you learn.

So the ultimate authority in the economic field is the desires of the customers.

And this is really based on a philosophical and metaphysical view about free will.

The desires of the customer, they emanate, they represent the free will of human beings, which is the highest authority in the universe, and therefore we must abide by them.

And it's the same in the political field, with the voter knows best.

And this was okay for the last 2 or 3 centuries because even though free will was always a myth and not a scientific reality, I mean Science knows of only 2 kinds of processes in nature.

It knows about deterministic processes, and it knows about random processes.

And their combination results in probabilistic processes.

But randomness and probability, they are not freedom.

They mean that I can't predict your actions with 100% accuracy because there is randomness.

If you connect a robot, say, to a uranium, a piece of uranium, and the decisions of the robot is determined by random processes of the disintegration of uranium atoms, so you will never be able to predict exactly what this robot will do.

Now this was always true from a scientific perspective.

But they are not free to choose their will.

They depend on a million factors, genetic and hormonal and social and cultural and so forth, which we don't choose.

Now, up until now in history, humans were so complicated that from a practical perspective, it still made sense to believe in free will.

Because nobody could understand you better than you understand yourself.

You had this inner realm of desires and thoughts and feelings which you had privileged access to this inner realm.

Yeah, but that hasn't changed today, right?

There is no longer the privileged access now belongs to corporations like Google.

They can have access to things happening ultimately inside my body and brain which I don't know about.

There is somebody out there, not just 1, all kinds of corporations and governments that maybe not today, maybe in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, they will have privileged access to what's happening inside me, more privileged than my access.

They could understand what is happening in my brain better than I understand it, which means they will never be perfect.

Right, but you will, as a free person, right, like you will have delegated that access or that ability to this corporation or this machine or this

I mean, in some countries, maybe you have no choice at all.

But even in a democracy like the United States, a lot of the information that enables an external entity to hack you, nobody asks you whether you want to give it away or not.

Now, at present, Most of the data that is being collected on humans is still from the skin outwards.

We are still just at the tip of this revolution.

Because at present, whether it's Google and Facebook and Amazon or whether it's the government or whatever, they are trying to understand people mainly on the basis of what I search, what I buy, where I go, who I meet.

The really big revolution, which is coming very quickly, will be when the AI revolution and machine learning and all that, the infotech revolution, meets and merges with the biotech revolution and goes under the skin.

When biometric sensors or even external devices, now we are developing the ability, for example, to know the blood pressure of individuals just by looking at them.

You don't need to put a sensor on a person.

Just by looking at the face, you can tell what is the blood pressure of that individual.

And by analyzing tiny movements in the eyes, in the mouth, you can tell all kinds of things from the current mood of the person, are you angry, are you bored, To things like sexual orientation.

So we are talking about a world in which humans are no longer a black box.

Nobody really understands what happens inside.

And it's open to others, certain others, more than it is open to you don't understand what's happening in your brain, but some corporation or government or organization could understand that.

And that's a theme that you explore in Homo Deus pretty.

This is like maybe the most important thing to understand is that this is really happening.

And at present, almost all the attention goes to the AI.

Like now I've been on a two-week tour of the US for the publication of the book.

Like AI, and the previous book, Homo Deus, came out, nobody cared about AI.

Yeah, and I try to emphasize it's not AI.

The really important thing is actually the other side.

It's only the combination, it's only with the help of biology that AI becomes really revolutionary.

Let's say we had the best, the most developed AI in the world.

But humans were not animals, were not biochemical algorithms, but they were something like transcendent souls that make decisions through free will.

In such a world, AI would not have mattered much, because AI in such a world could never have replaced teachers and lawyers and doctors.

You could not even build self-driving cars in such a world.

Because to put a self-driving car on the road, you need biology, not just computers.

For example, if somebody is approaching the road, the car needs to tell, is this an 8-year-old, an 18-year-old, or an 80-year-old?

And needs to understand the different behaviors of a human child, a human teenager, and a human adult.

And similarly, to have really effective self-driving taxis, you need the car to understand a lot of things about human psychology, the psychology of the passengers coming in and what they want and so forth.

So if you take the biotech out of the equation, AI by itself won't really go very far.

So I want to push you there because I think it's easy to arrive at a dystopian view of what that world would look like with the bio and AI and cognitive abilities of machines when they meet, like how that could end up, right?

And we see that in Hollywood, and that dystopian view is well documented.

But I want to explore with you, like what are some of the benefits of that combination, and how can that lead to an alternative worldview than what's explored more deeply in Homo Deus?

Well, it should be emphasized that there are enormous benefits, otherwise there would be no temptation.

And it should also be emphasized that technology is never deterministic.

You can build either paradise or hell with these technologies.

They are not just, they don't have just 1 type of usage.

And as a historian and as a social critic and maybe philosopher, I tend to focus more on the dangerous scenarios simply because for obvious reasons the entrepreneurs and the corporations and the scientists and engineers are developing these technologies, they naturally tend to focus on the positive scenarios, on all the good it can do.

But yes, I definitely acknowledge it can do a tremendous amount of good to humanity to take the example of the self driving cars.

So at present about 1250000.00 people are killed each year in traffic accidents.

More than 90 percent of these accidents are because of human errors.

If we can replace humans with self-driving cars, it's not that we'll have no car accidents, that's impossible.

But we'll probably save a million lives every year.

And similarly, the combination of being able to understand what's happening inside my body, this also implies that you can provide people with the best health care in history.

You can, for example, diagnose diseases long before the person understands that there is something wrong.

At present, the human mind or human awareness is still a very critical junction in health care.

Like, if something happens inside my body and I don't know about it, I won't go to the doctor.

So if something like, I don't know, cancer is now spreading in my liver and I still don't feel anything, I won't go to the doctor.

Only when I start feeling pain and nausea and all kinds of things I can't explain.

And finally they discover, oh, something is wrong.

And very often it's by that time, it's very expensive and painful.

Not necessarily too late, but expensive and painful to take care of it.

If I could have an AI doctor monitoring my body 24 hours a day with biometric sensors and so forth, it could discover this long before I feel anything.

At a stage when it's still very cheap and easy and painless to cure it.

But in that world, it's an AI doctor, not a human doctor.

And I think 1 of the potential outcomes that you warn about is AI or machines or that combination of bio and AI replacing us, replacing us as humans.

And I'd like to think that 1 thing that makes us human is having meaning in life or having a purpose for living.

That's kind of a unique thing that humans have.

And I don't think it's something that we would readily want to give up, right?

So as this technology is evolving and we're developing it, it's likely something that will bake in this need to have meaning and purpose in life.

You talk about in 21 Lessons this notion that God is dead or is God back and the role that religion may play in how we progress as humans.

Is there a place for that notion of God or religion to capture and secure like this notion of meaning in life or purpose in life?

I mean, there are many kinds of gods, and people understand very different things by the word religion.

If you think about God, so usually people have very 2, extremely different gods in mind when they say the word god.

We don't understand why there is something rather than nothing.

There are many things we don't understand about the world.

And some people choose to call these mysteries by the name of God.

God is the reason there is something rather than nothing.

But the most characteristic thing of that god is that we know absolutely nothing about him, her, it, they.

And this is kind of the god we talk about when late at night in the desert we sit around a campfire and we think about the meaning of life.

Then there is another god which is the petty lawgiver.

The chief characteristic of this god, we know a lot of extremely concrete things about that god.

We know what he thinks about female dress code, What kind of dresses he likes women to wear.

We know what he thinks about food, about politics, and we know like these tiny little things.

And this is the God people talk about when they stand around burning a heretic.

We burn you because you did something that this God, we know everything about this God and he didn't, he doesn't like it that you do this, so we burn you.

And it's like, you know, it's like a magic trick that when you come and talk about God, so how do you know that God exists and so forth?

People would say, well, the Big Bang and human consciousness and science can't explain this and science can't explain that.

And then like a magician swapping 1 card for another, they will take out the mystery god and place the petty law giver.

And you end up with something strange like, because we don't understand the Big Bang, women must dress with long sleeves and men shouldn't have sex together.

I mean, how did you get from here to there?

So, I prefer to use different terms here.

People understand very different things with this word.

I tend to separate religions from spirituality.

Spirituality is when you have some big question about life.

And this is kind of, and you go on a quest, looking deeply into these questions, and you're willing to go after these questions wherever they take you.

Maybe in the future, but so far, at least some of these questions, I think when you type like what is the meaning of life, you get 42.

Like that is the number 1 result in the Google search.

Religion is somebody comes and telling you, this is the answer, you must believe it.

If you don't believe this answer, then you will burn in hell after you die, or we'll burn you here, even before you die.

Now I think that at the present moment in history, spirituality is probably more important than in any previous time in history.

Because we are now forced to confront spiritual questions, whether we like it or not.

think that confrontation with those questions, that will inform how we allow technology to develop and be deployed?

Now, throughout history, you always had a small minority of people who was very interested in the big spiritual and philosophical questions of life, and most people just ignored them and went along with their, like, you know, fighting about who owns this land and this goat herd to whom it belongs and so forth.

Now we live in a very unique time in history when engineers must tackle spiritual questions.

If you are building a self-driving car, by force, you have to deal with questions like free will.

By force, you have to deal with the example everybody gives, the self-driving car, suddenly 2 kids running after a bull jump in front of the car.

The only way to save the 2 kids is to swerve to the side and fall off a cliff and kill the owner of the car who is asleep in the backseat.

Now, philosophers have been arguing about these questions for thousands of years with very little impact on human life.

Now but engineers are not like they are very impatient.

If you want to put the self-driving car on the road tomorrow or next year, you need to tell the algorithm what to do.

The amazing thing about this question now is that whatever you decide, this will actually happen.

Previously, with philosophical discussions, Like you had, I don't know, Kant and Schopenhauer and Mill discussing this issue, should I kill the 2 kids or should I sacrifice my life?

And even if they reach an agreement, it had very little impact on actual behavior Because even if you agree theoretically this is the right thing to do, at a time of crisis, philosophy has little power.

You react from your gut, not from your philosophical theories.

But with a self-driving car, if you program the algorithm to kill the driver and not the driver, the owner of the car and not the 2 kids, you have a guarantee, a mathematical guarantee that this is exactly what the car will do.

So you have to think far more carefully than ever before what is the right answer.

So in this sense, very old spiritual and philosophical questions are now practical questions of engineering which you cannot escape if you want, for example, to put a self-driving car on the road.

I want to go back to this concept of religion versus spirituality and like the role that play.

In Sapiens, your first book, you talk about this concept of human fictions or like stories that we create as humans, I guess, to get us through life and to get us through our interactions with each other.

Those fictions, those stories, as you put it, They've served us well.

They've resulted in a lot of good for humankind, but have also been the source of wars and conflict and human suffering.

How do you square that with this moment we're in where spirituality is an integral part in how we think about integrating technology in our lives.

Well, so far in history, in order to organize humans on a large scale, you always had to have some story, some fiction which humans invented, but which enough humans believed in order to agree on how to behave.

This is the obvious example that, and even religious people would agree that all religions except 1 are fictional stories.

If you ask a Jew, then they will tell you yes, Judaism is the truth, that's for sure.

But all these billions of Christians and Muslims and Hindus, they believe in fictional stories.

I mean all this story about Jesus rising from the dead and being the son of God, this is fake news.

You know, rabbis tend to be like, to hedge their bets.

But then you go to the Christians, they will say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

But the Muslims, they believe in fake news.

All this story about Muhammad meeting the archangel Gabriel and the Koran coming from heaven, this is all fake news.

And the Muslims, they will tell you this about Hinduism.

The more interesting thing is that the same is true in something like in the economy.

Corporation you can't have a modern economy without corporations like Google and without money like dollars.

But corporations and currencies, they are also just stories we invented.

Google has no physical or biological reality.

It is a story created by the powerful shamans we call lawyers.

Even if you ask lawyers, what is Google, like you push them to the, what is it?

And for example, I mean, if you somehow, it's some natural calamity, destroys, like there is an earthquake and the Googleplex collapses, Google still exists.

Even if many of the workers and managers are killed, it just hires new ones.

And even if there is no money in the bank, they can get a loan and build new buildings and hire new people and everything is okay.

But then if you have 1 of the most powerful shaman, like the Supreme Court of the United States, come and says, I don't like your story.

I think you need to be broken into 2 different fictions, Then that's the end.

So the advent that we're in now with fake news and really seriously questioning what veracity means and how veracity impacts these kind of foundational things that you laid out earlier in your remarks that have allowed us to work with each other, work across borders, et cetera.

With this, where you are on this notion of stories and fictions that we have, is this advent of fake news, is that a reality?

Is that what we should be in terms of questioning what's true and what's not true?

And sometimes in much worse form than what we see today.

I mean, you have all these stories people tell about reality.

The best test of reality that I know is the test of suffering.

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