60 Minutes - 10/31/2021: Democracy Lost, A New Model, The Future of Sapiens

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega has tightened his grip on power by making dozens of arrests of political opponents, journalists and protesters. Sharyn Alfonsi speaks to the wives of two imprisoned men who were planning to oppose Ortega in next week's elections. Lesley Stahl reports on a group of architects inspired by a project in Rwanda to create a new model of design. And in an interview with Anderson Cooper, world-renowned author Yuval Harari warns humans will be "hacked" if artificial intelligence is not globally regulated. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How does a country go from democracy to dictatorship in one generation? It's easier than you may imagine. This is Juan Sebastian Chamorro, a Georgetown-educated economist who was planning to challenge the dictator Daniel Ortega for president of Nicaragua. This video was recorded just hours before he was violently taken from his home by mass police officers. In it, he says, if you're seeing this, I've been captured. We Americans spend 90 percent of our time inside buildings. Well, we found a group of young architects who have set out to create a new model of architecture, one that is both beautiful and healthy for the people who build and use them.

Inspiration they say they got in Africa and have now brought home. What you were doing in Rwanda, you were also doing in Haiti, Malawi, and Poughkeepsie. Yuval Noah Harari is a world-renowned historian who's looked into the future and is more than a little concerned about what he sees. We'll soon have the power to re-engineer our bodies and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering

or by directly connecting brains to computers or by creating completely non-organic entities, artificial intelligence. And these technologies are developing at breakneck speed. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Next week, a country with a long, complicated history with the U.S. will hold its presidential election. Its president is seeking a fourth consecutive term

and has made sure nothing stands in his way. He's changed the country's laws, silenced the media, and locked up candidates who plan to run against him. Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega is not the fatigue-wearing revolutionary that you may remember. He's now 75 and rarely seen. Still, many Nicaraguans fear he is more dangerous than he's ever been. And tonight, you will hear from two women whose husbands were planning to challenge Ortega for the presidency. Both men were arrested by the regime in June, and their wives haven't seen or spoken to them since.

Now, the women are fighting to bring back their husbands, and a democracy lost. If you're seeing this, I've been captured. Those were the chilling words of Juan Sebastian Chamorro, hours before he was taken from his home by mass police officers in June. Eight police patrols were coming. There was a lot of cars, a lot of noise, a lot of people jumping in our walls. Victoria Cardenas is Juan Sebastian Chamorro's wife. Chamorro was planning to run for president against Daniel Ortega and was considered a leading candidate. Because of that, Cardenas says, police had been harassing him outside of their home for months. But on June 8th, they came in. He was on the floor with his hands up, saying, I am here, please don't do anything to my wife.

We are unarmed, and they jumped the walls, they broke in, and they took him violently. Cardenas hasn't seen or spoken to him since. Juan Sebastian Chamorro, a Georgetown-educated economist, is part of a prominent political family in Nicaragua. Days earlier, his cousin, Christiana Chamorro, who, coincidentally, was also running for president, was about to hold a press conference outside her home when police in riot gear showed up. You can see police push the crowd back. Chamorro was placed under house arrest.

Over the next two months, Nicaragua's police force detained dozens of critics of the regime, journalists, and ultimately seven of the leading candidates who plan to run for president against Ortega. Jose Miguel Vivanco is a director of Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group that's been reporting from inside Nicaragua for decades. A lot of dictators will at least go through the motions of pretending there's a legitimate election. He's not. Ortega's deliberate and flagrant crackdown against peaceful opposition leaders is something without any precedent in Latin America since the 70s and 80s,

when most of the region was under military dictatorship. What makes it unprecedented? Since Ortega controls Congress, he managed to pass legislation at the end of last year that sanctioned as treason essentially any criticism of the government. So if you criticize the government, you can be thrown in jail right now. The language that they use is any damage to the superior interests of the nation. It sounds Orwellian. Orwellian. It's completely Orwellian. In June, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for President Ortega to immediately release the candidates

and announce sanctions against members of Ortega's family and inner circle. Until a few years ago, it might have looked like Daniel Ortega had mellowed out with age. A far cry from the revolutionary President Carter invited to the White House in 1979. Ortega's Sandinista guerrillas were credited with bringing down the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua. Later, they fought off the U.S.-sponsored Contras. In 1984, Daniel Ortega was elected president and later sat down with our Mike Wallace. Ortega was voted out of office in 1990, but returned to power in 2006, promising to fight corruption. Instead, he tightened his grip on the country, first changing the constitution so he could serve

more terms, then making his wife, Rosario Murillo, an eccentric new age poet, his vice president. Their children also hold key positions in Nicaragua. Eight of the couple's nine children were made presidential advisors. They oversee a lucrative oil distribution business and most of the country's TV channels. But even as the Ortega family's wealth has exploded, Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. In 2018, Nicaraguans revolted. Thousands took to the streets to protest Ortega's proposed cuts to Social Security for senior citizens.

Soon, protesters were calling for Ortega and his wife to step down. Jose Miguel Vivanco says it was a turning point for the country. That demonstration was confronted with brutal force by Ortega. Thousands of people were injured, more than 700 were arrested, and at least 350 people were killed by police or paramilitary groups supported by the Nicaraguan government. All of those crimes, all of those atrocities committed by Ortega and his security forces just a couple of years ago, he was able to get away with those crimes. But Vivanco says Ortega also realized that if he lost power, he might be imprisoned for what Nicaraguan journalists called a massacre of protesters. Very few people around the world doubt that Nicaragua is a dictatorship.

Felix Maradiaga, a former cabinet member, was one of Ortega's most outspoken critics. A graduate of Harvard, he addressed world leaders at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in 2019. I come here with the conviction and hope that the world will continue to support the struggle of my people to build a free and open society. Felix Maradiaga was teaching non-violent activism to Nicaraguan students when witnesses say he was beaten by Ortega's henchmen in 2018. After this attack, Maradiaga was hospitalized. For the next few years, he was under constant surveillance by the police,

according to his wife, Berta Valle. They watched him. They put patrols in front of his house. The police would tell him that he was not able to go out of the house. And from December 2020 to February 21, he was under house arrest. So no warrant, but he's not allowed to leave the house. Exactly. Even so, Felix Maradiaga decided he would run for president, one of a group of opposition candidates who, for the first time, had decided to band together to try to defeat Daniel Ortega.

They signed a document saying that they were willing to support the one that could represent the Nicaraguan people. But the opposition never got the chance to put their candidate forward. Most were arrested or fled the country before they could file the paperwork to officially put them on the ballot. On June 8th, Felix Maradiaga was summoned to meet with government prosecutors. His family feared he would be arrested during the meeting. So he went with a lawyer, a friend, and he was interviewed for four hours. So Felix came out, he talked to the independent press.

Exactly. We were watching this live, and we said, oh, thanks God he came out. He's okay. He's going to take the car and he's going to leave. His attorney says they were driving away when Maradiaga was dragged out of the car and beaten by police. His wife hasn't seen him since that morning in June. It turns out Maradiaga knew he was in danger. Hours before his arrest, he left his daughter Alejandra a series of videos so she would hear his voice in case he wasn't there for her eighth birthday. I'm thinking of you on your birthday, he says, and tells her, I love you. She and her mother have been living in the United States for three years because of threats at home

and are now applying for asylum. He concealed Alejandra's identity for her safety. I want to go see my dog, my family. I have a cat and a dog. In August, we met Berta Valle and Victoria Cardenas in Washington, where they'd been petitioning U.S. lawmakers to help free their husbands and about 150 other political prisoners in Nicaragua. And we're demanding justice. At that point, the men had disappeared.

No one had heard from them or seen them in two months. Do you believe that he's still alive? That's what I want to believe. You know, we have the hope that he's okay, but we don't know. And that's why we are asking for a proof of life to this point. And this is why we are doing all this effort to come out and to go to the international community, because there's nothing we can do in Nicaragua. Last month, 87 days after their arrests, attorneys for Felix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastian Chamorro

were allowed to briefly see them at El Chapote, the Nicaraguan prison that's been described by human rights workers as a dungeon. Both men were charged with, quote, conspiracy to undermine the national integrity at a closed hearing in the jail. Attorneys say both Chamorro and Maradiaga have lost significant weight and been subjected to months of interrogations and psychological torture. It's a violation of the basic human rights. It's not only my family who is suffering. It's more than 140 families who have political prisoners who are innocent and are living this awful situation. Victoria Cardenas and Berta Valle cannot go back to Nicaragua. Because of their appeals for help to Washington and the international community,

the women have been charged in absentia with being traitors to the homeland. So what would happen if you went back to Nicaragua now? Would you be arrested? Definitely, yes. Not only arrested, but if they condemned me, that would be life prison. The violence in Nicaragua is fueling an exodus.

Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have fled to Costa Rica, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection says about 38,000 Nicaraguans have reached the U.S. border since June, compared to less than 800 people over the same time last year. In August, the State Department announced more sanctions against members of the Ortega regime. But at the same time, the International Monetary Fund approved sending more than $350 million to Nicaragua if supposed to help fight hunger and COVID. What do you think they're going to give that money to, just to put these people in jail and torture them even more? Last month, members of Congress from both parties demanded the IMF reconsider

sending more money to Nicaragua. This is just not acceptable. And called for stronger sanctions against Ortega. The Pentagon has also warned Congress that Russia has been supplying Nicaragua with millions of dollars in military equipment and training, and that Ortega has allowed Russia to build a listening station so close to the U.S. Haven't we heard this story before? This all sounds very familiar. It is. Going back 35 years to the middle of the Cold War, that is unfortunately the scenario where, you know, we are operating, we are living now.

Jose Miguel Vivanco says with Russia's continued military and financial support, U.S. sanctions will not be enough to convince Daniel Ortega to change course. Ortega has decided to stay in power for the rest of his life. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.

Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping, history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We Americans spend 90% of our time inside of buildings, yet most of us give little thought to the role architecture plays in our lives and our health. Tonight, we bring you a story about a group of award-winning young architects who have set out to create a new model of architecture. Not a particular style of building, but a way of thinking about how to build, who should build, using what, and for whom. Their non-profit firm based in Boston is called MASS, short for Model of Architecture Serving Society. And though they trained at Harvard, they say they learned the most important lessons of architecture during their time spent in, of all places, Rwanda. Rwanda is a country many people know for one thing, the 1994 genocide that killed more than 800,000 people.

Today, Rwanda is at peace, a bustling nation of 13 million working hard to lift its population out of poverty. There are construction projects all around the country, several of them being designed by mass. Though started by Americans, the head of its team in Kigali today is Rwandan architect Christian Benimana. I heard that when mass started, there was no word for architect in your language. And there is still no word for architect. You have an expression. Umuhanga, umuguhanga, inyumaku.

Meaning? Expert in the creation of buildings. Benny Mana told us he dreamed of creating buildings even as a little boy. But with no school of architecture in post-genocide Rwanda, he had to study in China, in Mandarin. Everything is designed around the picture. Michael Murphy, Mass's executive director, had a very different path to architecture. I studied English literature. Well, that's going to get you far in architecture. Murphy's life took a sharp turn after college, when his father was diagnosed with cancer, given just a few weeks to live.

Murphy rushed back to Poughkeepsie, New York, to their old home that his dad had spent weekends restoring. I said, what can I do while I wait here on death watch? And so I started working on the house. And after three weeks, he was still alive. Six weeks, we started working together. After a year and a half, I'd fully restored the building. He was fully in remission. And he said, you know, working on this house with you, it saved my life.

It healed me. Whoa. Wow. And then I said, well, I have to be an architect now. When he came in wearing these silver cowboy boots. Alan Ricks and Murphy became fast friends as first-year students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. But as they dove in, both found something wanting in the curriculum. We were learning about the heroism of architecture, the beautiful sculptures, the names of the famous architects. But not so much about how architecture could help people and communities. During first semester, Murphy went to a talk by one of his idols, Dr. Paul Farmer, who had founded the nonprofit Partners in Health to provide medical care for the neediest populations around the world.

He said, we're building hospitals, we're building clinics, we're building schools. And so when I went up to him afterwards to ask, you know, who are the architects that you're working with? He said, you know, architects have never asked us how they could be of service to what we're doing. So we often have to do it ourselves. Why weren't architects attracted to working with you? I mean, a lot of them care about the poor. They certainly do. But the way the incentive structure is set up is, hey, you give us money, we'll design something for you. So when Murphy offered to volunteer on a Partners in Health project in Rwanda the following summer of 2007, Dr. Farmer said, bring it on. We gave him some very humble projects.

You're smiling. Must be pretty good. He asked me if I would design a little laundry building. A laundry building? Well, how did the laundry look? It looked pretty good. It still pretty good. He asked me if I would design a little laundry building. A laundry building? Well, how did the laundry look? It looked pretty good. It still looks good. So good, he called Michael Murphy a few months later and asked if he could help design a brand new hospital for a remote district of 350,000 that didn't even have a doctor.

You're still a student. Still a student. So I looked around my classmates, said this crazy call came in. Can anyone help me? You said yes right away, without hesitation. I mean, who wouldn't? What an opportunity.

But when Dr. Farmer said their first design looked like an army barracks, Murphy decided to take a year off and move to the site called Butaro, where Farmer gave him three challenges he says have defined Mass's work to this day. The hospital should be beautiful. Building it should help as many local people as possible. And it should have natural airflow to prevent the spread of diseases like tuberculosis

that often ran rampant in enclosed wards and waiting rooms. Let me show you this image. Murphy showed us the design they came up with to move fresh air naturally through each ward. That's simple physics, where air moves from a lower to higher area. Beds would go in the middle, giving every patient a beautiful view. Beauty matters. The spaces around us that are designed with beauty say that we matter as individuals. If I were a doctor, wouldn't I say, I care about beauty, but I want a heart monitor first? Why make this a choice between a heart monitor and beauty?

Surely we can have both. What they couldn't have, heavy equipment like front-end loaders that were too costly to get to the site. And so we asked, could we dig it by hand? And we dug the foundation by hand. Employ more people. And, you know, shocker, we did it faster and cheaper than if we had the front-end loader.

How many people actually worked on this project total? Over 4,000 people worked on the project. And instead of trucking in materials, they decided to use volcanic stone that farmers here consider a nuisance because they have to clear it from their fields. You see the stone everywhere, but normally it's just piled up, and we thought this would be a really valuable material in the U.S.

Could we use it in a different way? They designed the whole hospital facade with it, hiring dozens of local Masons and spawning a new industry. This woman, who trained at Butaro, is now a forewoman with a team of masons she trains. In the amount of hours they spend doing this. Christian Benimana, back from Shanghai, was impressed by the thought given to the process of building and by giving so many people work, improving the local economy.

It is critical for us to have prospects for a better future. And give people pride in Rwanda. That's very important to me because it makes me proud as well. He joined the team and helped design housing for doctors at the hospital. Very quickly we had a lot of work because there weren't many other people doing this. They decided to become a non-profit architecture firm to work on projects that otherwise couldn't afford high-priced designs. They've built a maternity care center in Malawi,

a cholera hospital in Haiti, schools, all with the same principles of airflow, beauty, and creating jobs. A decade later, they have a staff of over 200, more than half of them Rwandan. This tree is even more beautiful close up. We visited Butaro Hospital this summer. Its central courtyard felt part medical center, part public gardens. And its covered outdoor waiting room and hallways in this time of COVID felt prescient. This entire hospital is designed around that simple idea that airflow, air movement, are the basic premise that we should design our buildings around, and in particular our hospitals,

so that patients don't transmit airborne diseases to each other. Four hours to the south, we went to see Mass's largest project yet, a 69-building campus for a brand new College of Agriculture funded by American philanthropist Howard Buffett. This space is really, we want to create a hub. It's spectacular. Where Mass is pushing its philosophy to the limit, as Alan Rick showed us, just about everything here, from the earthen walls... The lines you see are the layers. ...to the furniture... The woven backrests of these chairs.

...is being made locally. Under Christian Benimana's leadership, Mass started a furniture division to collaborate with local artisans on creative designs instead of ordering from a catalog. It's one thing to go to Dubai and Turkey and China and Europe and pick a chair from a showroom, put it on a flight and bring it here. It's another thing to figure out a system that can create more opportunities for growth. And if you're thinking Mass's model could never work in the U.S., Michael Murphy wasn't sure either until he was challenged by a community leader back home. He said, you're doing all this work in Haiti and Rwanda.

When are you going to come back to your hometown and work with us in Poughkeepsie? We need a lot of help. Poughkeepsie, like many once-thriving industrial cities, has seen factories close, its downtown choked off by highways, its storefronts boarded up. To top it off, its creek flooded during Hurricane Irene. We had just been in one of the most rural places in the world,

and we had seen a hospital change the economy. I said, why can't we do that same thing here in Poughkeepsie? So Mass opened a small office on Main Street and got to work. Radiant light coming off of there. Converting the city's old trolley barn into an art space and designing housing. It's helping turn this old building into a food hall. We're going to save this building. And converting this long-abandoned factory into a new headquarters for the environmental group Scenic Hudson.

If you look up, you can see that this whole opening was once a window. That was a window? That was all a window. Oh, my goodness. Murphy says old buildings like this were designed to let in fresh air. But with the invention of air conditioning, big windows became a liability. So we shrunk them and sealed our buildings airtight. This is a sort of devil's bargain because it has made all of our buildings have really

limited airflow. And hence, during COVID, we were all very vulnerable. We saw it with the nursing homes. And the prisons. Do you think that COVID will change architecture for everybody? Everyone around the world is going through a shift in their understanding of the buildings around us. That they may make us sicker. That they could make us healthier if they were better designed. Mass's new design will reopen the windows and, like a cutting-edge version of the hospital in Rwanda,

use a solar-powered system to heat and cool air at each window, eliminating traditional air conditioning and heating entirely. And they have a plan to transform that flooding creek that's become something of a garbage dump. Some gutters, we get shopping carts. What is that, an air conditioner? Mass landscape architect Sierra Bainbridge came here with ideas about widening the creek to help with flooding. But also... If you're taking a holistic view of the problem, then the solution also begins to be a holistic view. Mass came up with designs to turn the blighted creek into beautiful park space that would run

all through Poughkeepsie. Each project has to not solve for that one thing. We have to be thinking about how can we make design have the biggest possible impact. It's a lesson mass believes can apply in many American cities. They have projects now in Cleveland, Birmingham, and Santa Fe. And their gospel of architecture serving society has reached inside that ivory tower whose teachings they once found lacking. Last spring, Murphy taught lessons he learned in Rwanda back at Harvard. There's some clear simplicity to it. There's things we have to build, there's people we have to hire, there's materials we have to use. And if you think about the whole thing as a design project, you can have a lot more impact. travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard

and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. When Yuval Noah Harari published his first book, Sapiens, in 2014 about the history of the human species, it became a global bestseller. In turn, the little-known Israeli history professor into one of the most popular writers and thinkers on the planet.

But when we met with Harari in Tel Aviv this summer, it wasn't our species' past that concerned him. It was our future. Harari believes we may be on the brink of creating not just a new enhanced species of human, but an entirely new kind of being, one that's far more intelligent than we are. It sounds like science fiction, but Yuval Noah Harari says it's actually much more dangerous than that. You said we are one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from chimpanzees. Yeah. What the hell does that mean? That freaked me out.

You know, we'll soon have the power to re-engineer our bodies and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by directly connecting brains to computers or by creating completely non-organic entities, artificial intelligence, which is not based at all on the organic body and the organic brain. And these technologies are developing at breakneck speed. If that is true, then it creates a whole other species.

This is something which is way beyond just another species. Yuval Noah Harari is talking about the race to develop artificial intelligence as well as other technologies like gene editing that could one day enable parents to create smarter or more attractive children and brain-computer interfaces that could result in human-machine hybrids. What does that do to a society? I mean it seems like the rich will have access, whereas others wouldn't. One of the dangers is that we will see in the coming decades a process of greater inequality

than in any previous time in history, because for the first time, it will be real biological inequality. If the new technologies are available only to the rich or only to people from a certain country, then Homo sapiens will split into different biological castes because they really have different bodies and different abilities. Harari has spent the last few years lecturing and writing about what may lie ahead for humankind. In the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds.

He's written two books about the challenges we face in the future, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which along with Sapiens have sold more than 35 million copies and been translated into 65 languages. His writings have been recommended by President Barack Obama, as well as tech moguls Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. You raise warnings about technology. You're also embraced by a lot of folks in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Isn't that sort of contradiction? They are a bit afraid of their own power, that they have realized the immense influence they have over the world, over the course of evolution, really. And I think that spooks at least some of them. And that's a good thing.

And this is why they are kind of, to some extent, open to listening. You started as a history professor. What do you call yourself now? I'm still a historian, but I think history is a study of change, not just a study of the past, but it covers the future as well. Harari got his PhD in history at Oxford and lives in Israel, where the past is still very present. He took us to this archaeological site called Tel Gezer.

Four, five thousand years ago, this was one of the biggest cities in the area. Harari says cities like this were only possible because about 70,000 years ago, our species, Homo sapiens, experienced a cognitive change that helped us create language, which then made it possible for us to cooperate in large groups and drive Neanderthals and all other less cooperative human species into extinction. Harari fears we are now the ones at risk of being dominated by artificial intelligence. Maybe the biggest thing that we are facing is really a kind of evolutionary divergence.

For millions of years, intelligence and consciousness went together. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, like pain and pleasure and love and hate. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. But computers or artificial intelligence, they don't have consciousness. They just have intelligence. They solve problems in a completely different way than us. Now, in science fiction, it's often assumed that as computers will become more and more intelligent,

they will inevitably also gain consciousness. But actually, it's much more frightening than that, in a way. They will be able to solve more and more problems better than us without having any consciousness, any feelings. And they will have power over us? They are already gaining power over us. Some lenders routinely use complex artificial intelligence algorithms to determine who qualifies for loans.

Global financial markets are moved by decisions made by machines analyzing huge amounts of data in ways even their programmers don't always understand. Harari says the countries and companies that control the most data will in the future be the ones that control the world. Today in the world, data is worth much more than money. Ten years ago, you had these big corporations paying billions and billions for WhatsApp, for Instagram, and people wondered, are they crazy?

Why do they pay billions to get this application that doesn't produce any money? And the reason why, because it produced data. And data is the key. The world is increasingly kind of cut up into spheres of data collection or data harvesting. In the Cold War, you had the Iron Curtain. Now you have the Silicon Curtain between the USA and China. And where does the data go?

California? Or does it go to Shenzhen and to Shanghai and to Beijing? Harari is concerned the pandemic has opened the door for more intrusive kinds of data collection, including biometric data. What is biometric data? It's data about what's happening inside my body. What we have seen so far, it's corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin. I'm wearing a tracker that tracks my heart rate, my sleep. I don't know where that information is going.

You wear the KGB agent on your wrist willingly. And I think it's benefiting me. And it is benefiting. I mean, the whole thing is that it's not just dystopian. It's also utopian. I mean, this kind of data can also enable us to create the best healthcare system in history. The question is, what else is being done with that data

and who supervises it, who regulates it? Earlier this year, the Israeli government gave its citizens health data to Pfizer to get priority access to their vaccine. The data did not include individual citizens' identities. So what does Pfizer want the data of all Israelis for? Because to develop new medicines, new treatments, you need the medical data. Increasingly, that's the basis for medical research. And of course, it's not all bad.

Harari's been criticized for pointing out problems without offering solutions. But he does have some ideas about how to limit the misuse of data. One key rule is that if you get my data, the data should be used to help me and not to manipulate me. Another key rule that whenever you increase surveillance of individuals, you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the corporation and governments and the people at the top. And the third principle is that never allow all the data to be concentrated in one place. That's the recipe for a dictatorship.

Netflix tells us what to watch, and Amazon tells us what to buy. Eventually, within 10 or 20 or 30 years, such algorithms could also tell you what to study at college and where to work and whom to marry and even whom to vote for. Without greater regulation, Harari believes we're at risk of becoming what he calls hacked humans. What does that mean? To hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves. And based on that, to increasingly manipulate you. This outside system, it has the potential to remember everything,

everything you ever did, and to analyze and find patterns in this data and to get a much better idea of who you really are. I came out as gay when I was 21. It should have been obvious to me when I was 15 that I'm gay, but something in the mind blocked it. Now, if you think about a teenager today, Facebook can know that they are gay or Amazon can know that they are gay long before they do, just based on analyzing patterns. And based on that, you can tell somebody's sexual orientation? Completely. And what does it mean if you live in Iran, or if you live in Russia, or in some other homophobic country, and the police knows that you're gay even before you know it? When people think about data, they think about companies finding out what their likes and

dislikes are. But the data that you're talking about, it goes much deeper than that. Like think in 20 years when the entire personal history of every journalist, every judge, every politician, every military officer is held by somebody in Beijing or in Washington. Your ability to manipulate them is like nothing before in history. Harari lives outside Tel Aviv with his husband, Itzik Yahav. They've been together for nearly 20 years. It was Yahav who read Harari's lecture notes for a history course

and convinced him to turn them into his first book, Sapiens. I read the lessons. I couldn't stop talking about it. For me, it was clear that it could be a huge bestseller. Yahav is now Harari's agent, and together they started a company called Sapienship. They're creating an interactive exhibit that'll take visitors through the history of human evolution and challenge them to think about the future of mankind. Harari also just published the second installment of a graphic novel based on sapiens, and he's teaching courses at Israel's Hebrew University in ethics and philosophy for computer scientists and bioengineers.

When people write code, they are reshaping politics and economics and ethics and the structure of human society. When I think of coders and engineers, I don't think of philosophers and poets. It's not the case now, but it should be the case because they are increasingly solving philosophical and poetical riddles. If you're designing, you know, a self-driving car. So the self-driving car will need to make ethical decisions. Like suddenly a kid jumps in front of the car and the only way to prevent running over the kid is to swerve to the side and be hit by a truck and your own owner, who is asleep in the back seat, might be killed.

You need to tell the algorithm what to do in this situation. So you need to actually solve the philosophical question, who to kill. Last month, the United Nations suggested a moratorium on artificial intelligence systems that seriously threaten human rights until safeguards are agreed upon. And advisers to President Biden are proposing what they call a Bill of Rights to guard against some of the new technologies. Harari says just as Homo sapiens learned to cooperate with each other many thousands of years ago, we need to cooperate now.

Certainly now we are at a point when we need global cooperation. You cannot regulate the explosive power of artificial intelligence on a national level. I'm not trying to kind of prophesy what will happen. I'm trying to warn people about the most dangerous possibilities in the hope that we will do something in the present to prevent them. Now an update on a story we reported earlier this month. Scott Pelley spoke with Frances Haugen, the up-to-then anonymous Facebook whistleblower. When she left the company, she took tens of thousands of pages of internal research with her. Misinformation, angry content is enticing to people and keeps them on the platform.

Yes. Since then, she has testified before the Senate and the British Parliament. In November, she meets with the European Union. More than 18 news organizations, including CBS News, have joined in examining the research. And Congress is looking at possible regulations limiting how social media may harm young users. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.