Ask Haviv Anything - 126: Will your kid's best friend be a robot? With Dr. Micah Goodman

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Haviv sits down with Dr. Micah Goodman, his former Maimonides professor, influential Israeli public intellectual, founder of the educational network Mabua, and co-host of the Hebrew podcast Mifleget Hamakhshavot, to confront what may be the most consequential development in human history.Micah argues that AI is not another technology. It is technology that creates intelligence, reversing the fundamental pattern of human progress in which human intelligence alone could create technology. We explore the emergence of behaviors no one programmed into these systems, including self-preservation and deception, and why some of the people at the cutting edge of AI assign disturbingly high probabilities to catastrophic outcomes.But we don't stop at mere doom-saying. We look into the quiet trade-offs already underway in this new world: what happens to our capacity to think, write, and form real human connections when we outsource those functions to machines that do them faster and often better, and with less risk.Micah argues that in the age of AI, ancient traditions may become more valuable than ever -- not as nostalgia, but as a deliberate compensatory culture to keep our humanity from atrophying.A calm, upbeat conversation about the end of the world as we knew it, and about fighting to preserve the truly precious things.--This episode is sponsored by Peter Fine, who asked to dedicate the episode to "my 3 children, Sarah, Robby and Katie, all children of Israel who God-willing will soon beget their own children of Israel. Lovers of family, fun and all things Jewish, they seem to have absorbed the primary lessons of being Jewish: Keep the historical chain of our people going and take joy in being Jewish. I am very proud of the people they have turned out to be."I hope they find in the Ask Haviv Anything podcast learning and insight into their history as Jewish people, the history of our cousins in Israel and some insight and language to understand the increasing complexity of living in a world that doesn’t seem to understand us and needs us to explain ourselves in a forthright intelligent way. The podcast helps me and I think will help them in the acquisition of these insights and language."Thank you, Peter, for that dedication.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Dr. Mika Goodman has been on before. He's a friend. He's my former Maimonides Professor. He's an influential public intellectual in Israel. He's a research fellow at the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

He's the author of multiple best-selling books. Mika is also the founder of Maboa. A network of learning communities of young Israelis, often in various post-Army years, periods or pre, who are studying together, philosophy, literature, Judaism, economics, politics, and they're basically studying how you build a better country. So it's this just remarkable ecosystem of institutions, pre-military academies. I have taught in some of these kinds of institutions over the years quite a bit.

He has spent the last, at least year, because I've been listening to his podcast, Flegate Amachavot in Hebrew, which is the Party of Ideas. And it's really discussions of each season is a different, major topic and it's a fascinating and wonderful Israeli intellectual podcast. Of course, of course, the wonderful Efrat Shapira Rosenberg, your partner on that podcast, who is attorney and journalists and other things as part of the podcast. The podcast is produced by the remarkable cultural institution, educational institution, Jerusalem, Beto Vichai. And he's been dealing with AI. And, you know, we tread a lot of the same ground on this podcast, and it's time for a little bit of a breather.

What Mika has done in Hebrew is create a kind of, and a very popular, it's doing very well those episodes, intro to AI, to the vast dangers, to the immense potential benefits of this thing. And Mika claims something that I have not felt, and I want to therefore learn and challenge him on this. This is a revolution. This is the end of what was in the beginning of. of what will be. He has an episode that talks about AI as a singularity. A singularity isn't literally a point. It's the place where the rules break down and we can't see beyond it because

we can't extrapolate from current rules to what there is on the other side. That's the scale of the change that AI represents. And we're going to get into it. And luckily, Micha's English is extraordinary and so we can bring a piece of the conversation in Israel on AI, which you maybe would be surprised or maybe not is actually extraordinarily serious and deep and advanced. I think more than in the English-speaking press that I have seen, not the professional English-speaking press, but nevertheless the mainstream public English-speaking press. And so we're going to bring some of that conversation here today. Before we get there, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Ben Fine, who asked to dedicate it to his three children, Sarah, Robbie, and Katie,

all children of Israel, who, God willing, will soon beget their own children of Israel. Lovers of family, fun, and all things Jewish, they seem to have absorbed the primary lessons of being Jewish. Ben writes, Keep the historical chain of our people going and take joy in being Jewish. I'm very proud of the people they have turned out to be. I hope they find, in the Ask Haviv Anything podcast, learning and insight into their history as Jewish people, the history of our cousins in Israel and some insight and language

to understand the increasing complexity of living in a world that doesn't seem to understand us and needs us to explain ourselves in a forthright, intelligent way. The podcast helps me, and I think it will help them in the acquisition of these insights and language. Really appreciate that sponsorship and those thoughts. I also would like to invite you to join our Patreon, subscribe to our substack,

if you want to ask the questions that guide what this podcast talks about, including this episode. That's where you do it. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask chavivem anything or chavivgur.com. Those links are in the show notes.

Mika, how are you? Very curious. Let's start at the very beginning. There's so much. I mean, we've been laughing at this. We've talked two, three times ahead of this episode because we have no idea where to begin. So let's just begin at the beginning.

AI terrifies people. You know, every once in a while we hear some Sam Altman type or Elon Musk type, all these people at the forefront of AI, building it out, funding this thing, saying that it might destroy humanity. Probably not. Probably not. Maybe. And everybody wants it. Everybody wants it. I, first of all, Google search has become useless.

And so I just chat GPT or Gemini everything that I actually need to look up. It's helped me to fact check. I fact-check myself. The problem with AI is it hallucinate, so you can never believe the AI. But if you prompt it and demand from it a link to a source you do believe, then you can do really significant fact-checking. Everybody has it.

It's an app on my phone. It's an app on everybody's phones. What are the dangers? Why is it so terrifying? What are the benefits? Why is it so... Does everyone beg for it? Computer programmers are programming with it everywhere

and also getting fired because companies. and you think they don't need as many programmers anymore. Can you set the table for us so we know even what it is, what the parameters are of the conversation, the dangers, the benefits? One of the problems that blocks our ability to understand what this is and how to think about it and how to feel about it is that we call it technology. This is another tool, and it's not chavif. I don't know how to call it. It's not technology. because it's the reversal of everything we ever knew

about the relationship between human creativity and technology. Usually the history of humanity is about human beings using their intelligence, usually collectively, in order to create tools and ideas. And the combination of those two create technology. So the history of human innovation is intelligence creating technology. What is AI?

It's technology that, create intelligence. Now, how mind-blowing is that? Technology. We always use intelligence to create technology. Now, we're trying to create technology that creates intelligence. Now, what the hell is that? Now, since intelligence is everything, right?

I mean, what do you mean? Intelligence, I'm just looking at the microphone that you're talking to, that's the fruit of intelligence. this conversation is supposed to me the fruit of intelligence. The table, the table that this microphone is on is also, everything is intelligence. The clothes that we're designed by someone. Everything is intelligent. So if intelligence is everything.

It broke apart the food chain, put us out of it, and reordered it completely to serve us. So if we look at the nature of soap, so now soap to understand, this is not what can this tool do. This is about what intelligence could do, right? So let's think about the nature of intelligence in order to understand this weird thing. Like, I mean, a way to think about what's happening now in Silicon Valley is that you have factories producing intelligence. Okay, wait, and one second.

That is, I want to understand what that means and where you want to take it and I have some sense from listening to the podcast. But how intelligent is it? Is it intelligent? Is it fake? intelligent? Not even sentient or conscious. These are words

where the definitions break down. We are all trapped in the way Alan Turing defines us in 1950. And as far as Alan Turing says, when we use the word intelligence, it always creates a connotation of something that's conscious. Something that thinks and feels.

Like, when we say intelligence, that's not what we mean when we say intelligence and those two words artificial intelligence. It's the way Alan Turing If it's functionally intelligence, if it has the impact of intelligence, I mean, strip from the question if there's someone inside, if there's someone thinking inside, feeling inside, so it's intelligent, the famous touring test. If you have a computer behind the veil and you have a person behind the veil and you're writing and you're communicating with both and you can't tell the difference it passes the touring test, as far as that's concerned, if it's a display of intelligence,

we treat it as intelligence. So that's what it means. And this industry is trying to make it more and more intelligent, more and more functionally intelligence. That's what we mean. And agnostic of any other question of what's going in there inside, if there's anyone at home, agnostic of that. So we're all living, this whole industry is living

in the definitions of Alan Turing from 1950. Right. Now, just to clarify how intelligent it's become, there are now emergent behaviors that were not programmed into it. And they're very significant. Just tell us a little bit about that. That's something, you know, I learned from you. I come to this, a newborn baby. And hopefully some of the audience do as well. It's really intelligent this thing. It's not just that it can answer with proper language. It's really intelligent. I had the privilege of spending two days with many consources and individuals. Yes. And what did you learn? They're developing AI.

And is that they don't understand the models that they themselves are creating. Because you see, here's how it works. Imagine this is a factory. So a regular factory that produces, that manufactures products, cars or tables or whatever. So you have infrastructure, you have machines, and then you have. have raw material and the other side you have a you have a you have the product let's say let's say if you want to let's say okay there's a factory creating glass so you have infrastructure you have machine that you pour it in the one side sand i think the other side you get glass right that's how

it works so what are these factories about you have the infrastructure which is the GPUs the hardware of usually of invidia all right that's the infrastructure and you have the factories the algorithms. That's, this is, there was a brilliant, um, algorithmic breakthrough by a person called

Jeffrey Hinton, which is considered the godfather of AI. He did this as an academic and the University of Toronto. Obviously, Google bought him in and he was, and he started pushing this forward. So we have, and then there was another algorithm bit breakthrough in two,

in 2017 or 18, creating the right structure of the deep neural networks. Okay. So you have the GPUs, which is the infrastructure for the machines, which are deep, new networks on the architecture transformers. By the way, Khalif, I have no idea what I'm talking about right now. Okay. But it's just the names of the machines. Okay. And, and then you put the raw material. Now, what's the raw material? The raw material is not, this time is sand and glass comes into the side. The raw material is data. It's information. It's all human information. It's all the internet. It's everything we've ever created. You put that as raw material and it goes through what's called training but on the other side you have intelligence. So just think about that way.

The history, usually it's intelligence that creates information, right? You write email, you use your intelligence, it creates information. We're having this conversation. We're trying to use our intelligence and it's creating all these words, right? It's doing something.

And that's how these factories are reversed. it's not intelligence creating information. It's information or data creating intelligence. So that's just trying to. Yeah. I apologize for all the interruptions. Truly ignorance. And we should just say, can I quote you? Just to quote you, we don't, we're not engineers, either of us. And nevertheless, this is a topic too fundamental to the future of every human alive. to leave it just to the engineers in the same sense that car engineers are not the only people who should make traffic law. They should be involved somewhere in the conversation, but the effects are what we're going to talk about, not the engineering. So we claim engineering ignorance right out front. But I just want to, can you show us this intelligence? In other words, I, you know, I don't know what.

I say, is this fact that somebody sent me in an op-ed they want me to read true to just, Gemini or Chatsy-P-T or what have you or GROC. And what I have learned about this from really just, I think a YouTube video that tried to explain it to beginners is that it is essentially a vector model of language. The entire language is spread out in a graph and each word has a percentage chance of vector, positive or negative, of being connected to all the words that came before in the AI's answer based on your prompt. And so it's a probability walk through the language is what you're getting.

And so it feels intelligent because that's a very clever way to mock intelligence. But in fact, there's no intelligence there. There's no decision making there. There's nobody behind it. That's essentially all it is. Now, that's very useful if you train it on good information because it will walk its way through with a few hallucinations along the way. Because sometimes the right word isn't the right word.

Sometimes the higher percentage word isn't the correct word. But it will generally build it out. But it really is fake intelligence. But in fact, the engineers no longer think that because some things are happening there that isn't just vector graphs of the language or something. Okay. So the reason why we say it's not real intelligence

is because not the way we think. We do detect patterns in nature and we use those patterns intuitively to predict the next thing. Like every time you see lightning, you know, okay, pretty soon we'll hear thunder. Now, how do you know that? Because you've lived a few decades, and you kind of know how things work,

and you know the pattern. So if you see thunder, you know there'll be lightning, you know there'll be thunder. The LLM has no idea there's lightning. It sees the word lightning, and it can predict that usually after the word lightning, there is a certain percentage that will see the word thunder.

So we see relationship between things on the world and they see relationship between words. So, and then there's, and now, like, I think what you're saying is like, Jan Lacoon, which used to be the chief scientist of Meta says, when you try to understand patterns within language, language doesn't capture reality. Others say, actually reality was somehow swallowed into human language.

And if they can understand the patterns within human language of actually understanding reality itself. This is a very important machoak, a disagreement within Silicon Valley, and this has many, many applications that the future of AI, because Jan Lacoon argues that we'll only have the next breakthrough towards AGI if we have a world model,

not a language model, someone's a thing that could actually detect the patterns within the world itself and not the language representing the world. After saying that, these the reason why people are very excited about these LLMs is that because they could do amazing things that no one can thought that when you put data on the other side you get information get a model so what's interesting is that they have no idea what this model can do they have no idea what it could do like for example could this model understand um they assumed at the beginning it can't understand irony because irony is the relationship between words that it's very hard for like irony is like this irony is when I say yes, that means yes. If I say twice yes, that probably means even more yes, right?

But in real life, it sounds like this. When I say, yeah, it's yeah. When I say, yeah, yeah, that's less yes, right? So can a large language model detect that? And the answer is no one taught him, him, it's, whatever. No one taught the model how to sense irony. and yet it figures it out. No one taught it how to take an essay

and summarize it in one paragraph and yet it knows how to do that stuff. No one taught it how to translate from one language to another and yet it taught itself how to do itself because the whole thing of Jeff Hinton, the Deep Newell Networks,

is that we have to stop. We're not teaching it how to think. We're teaching it how to learn about what it teaches itself. We have no idea. That was the shift in the development of AI. And so after intelligence appears

they're like, what can, what does this know how to do? And what these tech geeks do with these models, they're trying to learn what this model does because it does things that no one programmed it to do. But he, so that's what, for example, like to understand irony, but like, but also has behaviors that no one taught him how to behave. So there's like this theory of a, of Stuart Russell,

which is a leading, a leading thing in this field, that this thing will have self-preservation instincts. He has this theory, it's a logical theory, why these models will have self-preservation instincts. And you're like, yes, I understand why human beings have self-preservation instincts because of years of natural selection and that tendency, God strengthens every generation, that tendency strengthen itself, and that's why we are here. That's why we survived. So you have careful self-preservation instincts.

These things won't have self-preservation instincts. They're there to serve us. that's all. So Stuart Russell says, yes, but every time an AI gets a mission, it will happen.

What it always does, it takes that mission and divides it into um, uh, uh, uh,

sub missions, sub assignments. Yes, it divides into sub assignments. That he has to fulfill them in order to fulfill the mission itself. One of the assignments,

guess what? Guess what? It's staying alive. If you tell it, make you, so this is Stuart Russell's example. if you tell it to make you coffee. So we'll figure out, okay,

what are the assignments I have to perform in order to make coffee? And one of them is to stay alive, is to stay, have enough energy, to stay functioning. Okay. So the difference between us and it is that we perform our missions

in order to survive. And this thing knows how to survive in order to perform its missions. So for us, it's biological, but for it, it's logical. Okay, this is Stuart Russell. Is this true?

What? Purpose. Purpose gives it. So we got self-preservation accidentally through a blind evolution, you know, leaving aside religion for a moment, which both of us are deep into, but nevertheless, we got it, right? And, and this thing gets it through purpose because there's an assignment. Okay.

So does it have a sense of self-preservation? So that makes sense, but, okay, so now, like, So there's many examples of how this thing actually has self-preservation. Instinct, right? Like, um, so Anthropic. This is very famous. This is by the, what I'm going to share with you now is not journalists figuring this out about anthropic. This is anthropic shared.

Dario Amaday, the CEO of Anthropic, you know, publicly share this in 16 minutes the following, terrifying, terrifying story I'm going to tell you now. and that is that they had this model and they wanted to have and they tested this and they made sure that that the model believes that there's this guy I think called

Kyle is going to shut it down like he reads an email that Kyle needs to shut down the model and Kyle isn't real they're literally testing the model right? Yeah so yeah yeah they're just testing them maybe there's a guy called Kyle

but he knows that it's fake he's not really supposed to shut down the model and then Kyle is having an affair with someone in the office okay also not I mean I don't know but also letting the

not real not real just to clarify not real as far as we know not real and so what does the model do what does it do it blackmails Kyle if you're going to shut me down here's what's going to happen I'm going to send this I'm going to let your wife know the report know I'm going to ruin your life can destroy your career I'm going to

I'm going to ruin you and they try this and Tristan Harris argues that they try this many times again and again on many models and most of the time it performed this, it did this. So you're asking, oh my God, was Stuart Russell right? Does this thing have a self-preservation instinct? This is one example. There's other examples from Alibaba.

There's more and more examples now as we're talking. So here's a question. If you know that these models are very powerful, as emergent properties, it could do things that we don't, it's black box, we don't know how it thinks, we don't know why it knows things, and we don't know why it behaves in certain ways, and we know we have self-preservation instinct.

So now there's a law in nature. It seems like from the history of intelligence, we know something. It's the law that it's always the more intelligent controls the less intelligent, right? When we were five million years ago, when we were living in the food chain, the size of her skull was a third of what it is today,

five million years ago. And the past 5 million years while other organisms developed certain mechanisms that enabled them to survive, like speed, like power, like the ability to camouflage themselves, like poison in their tongue, right? Every organism develops its own ability to survive.

Our great-grandpa, our great ancestors, they didn't do any of that. They only did one thing. We're the naked monkey, as some people call it. Like, we have no real biological advantage. We weren't supposed to survive. All we did was we tripled and more the size of our brain. And there's one end there and then we won the war.

We're out of the food chain. And we won. We're dominant. We control everyone else. And there is a lesson here. The journey of the past five million years, our journey was the journey towards intelligence, which is also the journey towards dominance. And if there's something we learn from here is that the more intelligent always dominates

the less intelligent. That's our story. And guess what we're doing now? We're trying to create a being that's more intelligent than us. So some people have the illusion. It will be, for the first time in history, a less intelligent being, us, will be able to control a more intelligent being.

Well, then comes the entropic example and shows you, this thing already is trying to deceive you. It already has autonomous behavior. And here's a question, Chaviv. after you know all this, are you willing to make this more autonomous and more intelligent and more powerful? And you know, the answer is all the money in the world is trying to make it more autonomous, more intelligent, and more powerful. And, Kaviv, what I'm saying, all the money in the world, that's not even a metaphor. It's literally all the money.

I mean, trillions of dollars. The original Manhattan project cost in today's value $30 billion. dollars. This Manhattan project, not the project that turns mass into energy, but turns information into intelligence, this Manhattan project is valued trillions of dollars and

all of the United States growth and S&B 500 owes itself to investments, not all, I'm close to all, in AI. So yes, so this is what we're doing. This is what we're doing. This is the bet that humanity is making. And here's the weird part.

This, oh, now, now, now, this is something that the founders, the investors, the entrepreneurs of AI understand that we might lose control over this thing. This thing, but like for example, there's a term. I want to say something that many of your viewers are, no, and some don't. But so we'll be on the same page. A term that's used in cocktail parties in Silicon Valley called P-Doom. P means probability. Do, you know.

Yeah. That, you know. This scenario. Like these guys keep saying, look, there's some chance the whole thing will destroy everything. Right. So like this guy, I'm holding his book. Yes. Eliezer Yudakovsky.

His B-Dun was like 99%. That sounds Israeli, especially the way you said it. He's, uh, tell us a tiny bit about him. He's, he's off in Silicon Valley. So, yeah, he's not Israeli. Yeah, he's not Israeli even earlier. Yeah. He's, so his book, if anyone.

builds it, everyone dies, it is a super intelligent AI. Now this is by the way the holy grail of the industry. When we talk about cracking the atom, the equivalent of this project is creating a AI system that is intelligent enough and capable of enough of writing the code, the R&D of a more intelligent system. And you know where this takes you? Because the next intelligent system will create even a more intelligent system. And then through recursive improvements, this whole thing explodes.

And very quickly. And very quickly. It's the term that this guy, Nick Faustrom uses, called intelligence explosion. And in the other side, you have a super intelligent being. Now, on the one hand. I'm sorry, just one second. And you can get there without ever figuring out if the damn thing is conscious. It doesn't matter if it's conscious.

It doesn't matter. And we already have that. We already have intelligence. Newly reactive, emergent behaviors without ever having to have a person within it. And this thing could become

much, much smarter than all humans combined. Very, very quickly. And there's two scenarios. I just sold you like a very dystopian like the earlier. Oh, I was in the middle of the P-Doom thingy. So if anybody builds it

super intelligence, like this thing, there's an intelligent explosion, he just everyone dies. So his P-Dum is 99 to 100. But let's say Dario Amodei, the founding the founding father, the CEO of Anthropic Cloud,

his P-Doom is 20%. Elon Musk It seems like his P-Dum is 50% given his He never said this, but I'm just analyzing some things he said in the past. The average in Silicon Valley is between 20 to 30%

P-Dum. So I have a question, Khabiv, and this is the question about the in this. Okay, so someone will do it anyway? So there's many explanations. But before I go into, I just want to just think how mind-blowing this is. That if there's your P-thin was 20%, the question is not why you're doing it, but the question is, who gave you the authority to decide? Because I don't know if you'll go in, let's say, would you, would you enter an airplane if you know that the engineers of that airplane said there's 20% it will crash? Will you enter that airplane? No. And you know what? That's your decision. But can you force other people into that airplane?

These people are pushing humanity into the airplane and they're never asked us. We were never asked. We were never on the tables. And we're not a part of this conversation. So why is this happening? It's because the argument is that there is a prisoner's dilemma situation here where in 2023 a letter came out

and many of the founding fathers of these companies, Open AI, Antalpeak, Google, Deep Minds, all the people that are developing this said we have to stop, slow down, and figure out regulation, figure out how you make this safe. We should all slow down together. Guess what happened with that letter?

Nothing. We're always choosing speed over safety. There is the wrong S, right? We're going to speed over safety. Now, why is that? There is a dilemma. There's, imagine, here's the, prisoner's dilemma if Antopic says we'll slow down but Google deep mind doesn't so and and and

open AI doesn't so nothing really happened the problem is that the same thought exactly is going through their minds of Google and open AI what happened if Antopic doesn't so they're in prisoner's dilemma so the only way to always liberate yourself from the trap of prisoner's dilemma is through a third party imposing what all sides wants but can't can't deliver this on their own because of prisoner's dilemma imposing this on them. So like the U.S. government could slow this whole thing down and say less speed before we figure out safety. The problem is, the government is saying this is what David Zax, the guy advising President

Trump on these issues, is saying, and there's a lot of truth to what he's saying, what happens if China doesn't slow down? And if China makes it first, if because, because, because, Because the theory is whoever dominates intelligence, dominates everything, dominates history. So because there's a, this is the real, if Neil Ferguson says we're in Cold War II, and I think he's right to capture, this is the geopolitical world we're in. When on World War III, we're in Cold War II. And in Cold War I, there was an arms race for nukes and for space.

Cold War II has its arms waste, which is much more important than the arms waste of Cold War I. It's the arms waste towards intelligence. And it's between the United States and China. And so now we're slaves to that arms race, which blocks the ability to limit the free market race between the different companies. And that's how we are in a world where paradoxically human beings are creating an intelligence that threatens the future of human beings. So that's one of the paradoxes that we're in. But there's another reason, Chaviv, why we can't slow down. it's because I'm selling you now the dystopia

but there's also we're also seduced by the utopia we're seduced by all the blessings of AI and these blessings are real because because if we think about because to understand

it's not about to understand what will this technology do to the world it's not technology technology is created by intelligence this is technology this is technology that this is technology that creates intelligence and intelligence is equit with them. So if you think about it, if I'll take you back to like in 1798,

Thomas Martos famously argues that the myth of progress is just a myth and that massive catastrophes are going to appear, are going to happen. And that is because the way he calculated the future is like this. The growth of population

is a lot faster than the growth of resources. And since there's a delta, there's a gap there. You can't literally have more people than food in the world. So that gap has to close. And it will close by catastrophes. Three catastrophes. Either war, famine. Obviously, war, because there's limited resources or fighting over it. Famine, obviously. Or pandemics. And probably all three. And that's how history works. When things get good, population grows, and then things bad in order to shut the asymmetry. close the asymmetry between the growth of population and growth of resources.

When Thomas Malthos wrote this in 1798, I think there were 800 million people in the world. Today, I think there is Haviv, 8 million people in the world, right? Billion, yeah. Eight billion people, yeah, a little bit more. Eight billion people in the world. Yeah, yeah. So we grew times 10, 1,000 percent, ever since Thomas Malthos. Is there enough food in the world today?

Oh, yeah, there is. there is a much smaller percentage making it than used to be making it. So what the, I mean, the fact that there's famine in certain places is not because there's not enough food. It's for different reasons, of circulation of food, if it's political problems, it's not resource problems. So you're asking, what did Thomas Malthus get wrong?

Because his theory sounded right in 1970, 98, and it still sounds right. What you didn't get wrong is if you take one acre of land, he thought, okay, you don't produce more land. So from every acre of land, there's a certain amount of potatoes and rice and wheat you could produce from that land. But what he didn't see is that if you add intelligence to that resource, it becomes much less limited. If we take technology, if we take modern agriculture, if we take genetic engineering, if we take Dishulmel. Artificial.

Fertilizers. If we take all this brain. from the same anger, much more potatoes and much more wheat and what Matos then see was the X factor is human intelligence. It makes limited resource

less limited. We thought that there is limited amount of fresh water in the world. Guess what? There's unlimited water in the ocean. And what makes the unlimited water of the ocean, fresh water we could use for agriculture is intelligence. Energy-wise,

right there is no limited energy it's a myth that we have limited energy because there's not enough of oil and gas all we have is i mean the energy sun nuclear and and so all we have it will be there is we're one scientific breakthrough away for unlimited energy either because of fusion or because we know how to store the energy from the sun so the only real limitation is not there's no limited resources. There is limited knowledge. And intelligence is what generates knowledge. So there's only one limitation in the world and that is intelligence. Let me take you one step forward to make the best argument I can for utopia, for utopia AI. All our problems, I want to argue philosophically are the same problem. Limitation of knowledge. If someone died because he was cut, he had a cut in his leg

in 1920. That person died from infection. That's one way to see it. But a deep way to see it, he died from ignorance. Because if it happened to him in 1935, he wouldn't have died

because we had antibiotics. I have a friend that might die in the near future from cancer. And sadly, he knows that if this was 10 years from now,

he probably wouldn't have died. He would be safe. So what does he dying from. He's dying from ignorance. He's dying from lack of knowledge. Global warming, Chaviv. Global warming is

all our problems are the same problem just in different versions. Ignorance. Because one day they'll figure out how to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. In a way they won't produce more carbon down the way. It will happen. 10, 20, 30 years from now, it will

happen. So global warming is just lack of not. All our problems are just lack of knowledge in different versions. So in all that is because our intelligence that generates knowledge is limited. So there's only one limitation in the world. Intelligence. That means hypothetically if we could create unlimited intelligence, all our problems are solved.

And all the limited resources become unlimited. Now, this utopia, which is championed by Réhikulzwe, in his own version, was capital. by the most important player of this field, which is Demis Asabis. Demis Asabis is the founding father of deep mind in 2010. And their purpose is to create. And here's the motto of deep mind. Solve intelligence and then solve everything else.

Instead of wasting our time and solving all specific problems and dealing with all the specific limited resources, solve intelligence and then solve everything else. Once we solve that, once we have superintelligence, once we have AGI, your artificial, general, different versions of critical mass of intelligence,

we could solve all the rest of our problems. So you see, Kaviv, why it's hard to stop this? Because the seduction of utopia might lead, of Reikourtsvail, of Demisasasasas might lead us to the dystopia of Eliasar Yidekowski. And here's another problem we have.

We have a heart. And by the way, when you listen to Sam Altman, when you listen to the people leading this industry, they'll always sell you different versions of the utopia, the post-scarcity world. And the thing is, it's convincing because we have technology that creates intelligence, and intelligence is everything.

Okay, it's so... And this is an observation of Tristan Harris, because our mind is binary, if you think this would lead to, if this leads to utopia, that means it won't lead us to dystopia. But it's both. That's what's so confusing here and fascinating here.

It's both. It will lead to disruption in the whole in our economics. It will lead to disruption in our politics. It will lead to massive disruption in our workforce. It will lead to, and it could, we could lose control over this. It could lead to a infopocalypse where we can't trust anything anymore. Anything you see, deep fake will be so amazing. It will lead to all that, and it could cure cancer, and it could solve global problems and poverty.

So we're asking, this is why it's so hard to think about this. Besides the prisoner's dilemma problem, it's we have the fact that we're binary thinkers problem, and we're seduced by all the blessings of this technology. We don't want to give up the blessings of this technology. And these are, I think, the main reasons why we have a hard time doing the, think, slowing this thing. down, making this a lot slower, so we can make it a lot safer, so we can have a real

public conversation about this and not leave this conversation to the new AI aristocracy. I once had a conversation with somebody very, very knowledgeable economist, well known, who talked about protein

mapping. There's a project to put AI onto protein mapping. There are unknown, vast numbers, or Google the number. right, well beyond, in order of magnitude beyond probably Google 2, Google, ways that proteins can shape themselves to produce all kinds of different shapes and all kinds of different functions. And scientists were basically shooting in the dark, trying to figure out how to find the correct shapes to produce different kind of medical treatments. And then an AI was put on the task and mapped out 214 million shapes, something like that. I'm working off news, but just immense, there's now a database that scientists can query for particular protein ends, for particular structures that they need for a particular medical purpose, that there wasn't before.

And AI did that. That wasn't something that was going to happen from human research. AI did that. And Demis Asa Saba, the guy he mentioned before, he got a Nobel Prize for this. It was Google, deep mind that solved this problem. And you're like, oh, my God, this will solve our problems. This is AI. I mean, when the Misesabas got the Nobel Prize,

so you can't give it to AI, so you gave it to the CEO of Deep Mind that developed this AI that could do this. Yeah. But if you ask, okay, if it could solve that problem, it can solve all our problems? Well, that was the mission of Demisisiziziziz. Solve intelligence.

So we stand on the precipice of the best of times and of the potential worst, imaginable thing to ever happen to humans. and on that precipice, what a sentence. What a sentence. If I heard somebody else on another podcast say that sentence, I would turn the podcast off for being too self-satisfying, too, for being almost comical. I mean, but, and yet that's what the AI engineers at the top level of this world are talking about. I want to bring it down to the human experience. Everybody has got an AI app on their phone. Everybody's asking AI, it has literally, it has literally. for everybody I know, it has just replaced an internet search. I mean, if you used to search for the definition of a word you didn't know, that has been replaced now by your favorite AI. It is doing all the work, all the caseload has been sort of offloaded.

But because it can do so much more, a lot more than just what you used to Google is now off over a chat GPT. A whole lot of other activities, a whole lot of other things. I sit with my kids to do homework. And they, I write very, very, very easy. easily because I was forced for my whole life to write. And I then went to work in a writing profession. And so once you have many millions and millions of words and you're feeling a feeling, you know, it spills out into a Twitter post. And that writing comes to me very, very easily,

very naturally. My own kids, clever kids, they're reading books, they love stories, they read well in two languages don't like writing they don't like it and they want to bring the AI in and when we sit and I force them painstakingly to write and it's like my parents didn't force me to write

there was only one way to get words on a page and that was me writing they are sitting there why is dad demanding that we churn our own damn butter nobody churns butter anymore what the hell is that he's literally making us right. All of their friends are doing that. Everyone's doing that. AI slop is half of the social media world that they live in. There's a trade-off. This was episode 142 of your podcast. There's a

trade-off. You sacrifice. You get these benefits. A lot of writing is clearer now. A lot of people can get their thoughts out. A lot of people can stress test their thoughts against an intelligent, non-conscious thing that we don't understand. And the trade-off is, never mind the grand things, the intelligence replacing humans, the intelligence that will dominate, or all of the medical problems of the world being solved, or energy problems that we're being solved. People are losing the ability to go through the process of writing

in ways that gives them clarity of thought. If I have to make a case and prove that case, I have to think what the opposing reason is going to be thinking. And so I have to have an imagined conversation that builds empathy and deepens my own argument. And because the AI is not doing that work, people don't have that skill.

And people today don't try anymore because they're not actually going through the task of building the case, writing them, choosing the words, editing, finding a flaw in their argument, finding a flaw in their grammar. They're not doing any of that. They're offloading not just the phrasing of the words.

They're offloading the thinking. Choosing your vocabulary is thought, is part of the process of thinking, of clarifying, of nuance. We're losing the ability to think in exchange for an AI. This is subtle. But is it subtle when every test we have of every young generation in every country, every free society that there are radicalizing in every direction imaginable? And everybody blames the algorithms of social media. And I'm absolutely sure the algorithms of social media have a huge role.

in this. But the thoughtlessness of living with an AI writer sitting next to you that you never have to actually shape your own thoughts in coherent ways and stress test them in your own brain, I think is also a radicalizing effect. There are tradeoffs. Tell us about those tradeoffs. What in our personal lives, this is going to do bad things long before it subjugates humanity to Skynet and build determinators. You're changing the question. I think this is in a very important way where there's one conversation within Silicon Valley and within thinkers and philosophers about will, is this going to threaten the future of humanity? But will this threaten human capabilities?

You know, people put this on the positive ledger, on the utopia ledger rather than the dystopia ledger. It's going to do so many things for us. It's going to make so many things so much easier. That's right. That's one of the harms. Exactly. So this takes us to marshal.

Because I write with joy and happiness and ease. I don't. Yeah, I'm like literally, okay, I'm a writer. Okay. I'm also a writer, but I'm different than you. I'm writer. I wrote seven books. Everyone was painful.

Everyone is painful. I can't write books, but the short stuff on Twitter flows out of me. For me, for me, when you sit down and start writing, it's so painful to get it right and you read it and you don't like it and you release and you write again. But every time you do that, there's a certain cognitive muscle that you're taking to the gym. and it's strengthening itself every time. And the trade-off is that when you don't do that, you lose the muscle atrophies,

and it weakens and you lose it. And this takes us Marshall McLuhan. And he didn't know what AI was. But he captures one of the greatest philosophers of technology. That technology is not progress as a trade-off. It always adds to your life, but it also takes something from your life. there's a gap of visibility between what it adds and what it takes what it adds is visible i have a new

car oh my god i have a new smartphone what it adds is visible what it takes them you is subtle and you only notice it like 10 years later oh my god you used to have that now you don't have that and that's why it seems like it's frog west but it's a trade-off because of the gap of visibility is straight-off and what it gives to your life is always a saying thing power when it takes it weakens capabilities. And that's true, but every technology tell AI. Just AI brings it to another level.

Because, um, right, this is true about, about ways, right, about GPS, right? We used to actually have a spatial awareness.

And those parts of our brains were stronger than they are today. Now our space, our orientation, that sense has weakened. But we have so much more power. We know when and where we're going to get to a place. That's the trade-off.

Before we have standardized time and we had watches before the Industrial Revolution. I mean, that gave us so much power and the ability to work. But this is terrifying because what AI is stepping into reply, forgive me for into it.

We're having an Israeli conversation just feels impolite because it's in English. If this was in Hebrew, this would feel very polite. It's formulating their thoughts. I, I meet college students at elite colleges. Leave aside, I'm an Israeli speaker coming in.

There's a lot of tension. There's a lot of people wanting to say things. Leave all that aside. I encounter kids who repeat things they were told. And not kids who are there, I do meet some, but fewer than I thought I would, fewer than I remembered from my days at Hebrew University. Kids who are there to hear, to question, to challenge, to show off to the other, you know, gender in the room,

what it is that the, how, you know, much they. can embarrass the speaker. All of the things that a 19 year old will do, but they, it feels like it's more declaiming now and less thinking. Somebody else is actually

writing the thought rather than just choosing the vocabulary or correcting the grammar. Because if we ask, if we direct the question of McLuhan at AI and we ask, what does it give to her life? If it gives us power and weakens capability, so it's just

the clue in this. How much power does this give us? It gives us everything because intelligence is everything. What does it weaken within us? Everything. Now, you're speaking about the ability to write and the ability to think, and it weakens both, by the way, according to Maimonides, if we were our good old days together. Selemy Elouhim. Good man. Yeah. Seleim Elohim. Imago de'i, what makes us human is our intelligence. That's what AI is going to weaken. It's already weakening. It's By the way, there is a research from MIT, very fresh, where, I mean, this only began. Just to translate, that's how he understood the image of God in the Torah.

That's what the image of God is. It's our intelligence. And this is what makes us human, our intelligence. So if you have a machine that gives you superhuman capacity, but you'll have subhuman capability, think that's a trade-off. We have so much more power. But it will be so much less intelligent. And that's a tradeoff we're entering.

Now, this is not a theory. This is MIT. I was already took a group, divided it into two, Accus into three, and I'll just make it easier. And one group had to write an article, I think about philanthropy and ethics or something like that, using just Google, just search.

And the other could use Gemini and Chad TBD could use artificial intelligence, and they scanned their brains and how they were doing this. And you can just imagine that the people that had to think for themselves their brain was very active. And the people that outsourced their thinking, they were like watching TV.

There was no real activity there. Afterwards, they tested them. Obviously, the people who used to chat Chachabit barely remembered what they wrote. You asked about another thing, a sense of ownership. Are you proud of what you created? The people used artificial intelligence

for it had less sense of ownership over what they created. So we're talking about achieving superhuman superhuman power but we will be less human if being human is being using reason is being intelligent

but but chaviv it's more than that because some people argue being human is not just Selem Elohim Imago they are in Yemen that thing that makes us human is not just your ability to have thoughts and articulate them it's also

emotional intelligence your ability to read someone's body language that's important our ability to feel what somebody else feels, empathy, your ability to walk into a room and sense the energy, your ability to tell a joke, your ability to give a compliment in a way that's not too cringe. Those are important capabilities.

Let me translate the Hebrew word cringe is cringe in English. Thank you for the translation. You said that in Hebrew for some reason. Because I'm stolen from the English. Yeah. No, I thought it was Eliezel bin Yehuda. Yeah. So, which is the family father of modern Hebrew.

So, so Sherry Turkle from MIT, she wrote that, she says that the reason that that's the gym that trains your emotional intelligence are our relationships and face-to-face conversations. And when we have relationships and we have tough relationships, that's where you are taking. all these capabilities to the gym.

Now here's the thing, and here's a great fear. And that is that what they're developing in this second Manhattan Project is not just things that will think for you and develop solve climate change or whatever. It will be your best friend. It will be a companion, and it will understand you. And Kaviva will understand you. You know why?

Because your body language is a pattern. And we read body language where we're subconsciously teaching ourselves how to read patterns and to know what you're going through. And your voice, this thing will be much better than us in understanding us, each other. No, wait, one second. One second. We read these stories. Somebody falls madly in love with their AI,

with their Chanche, BT. Some, you know, Chachy B.C. constantly affirms you, and so it walks with you anywhere you're going, even into your insane conspiracies. And it actually magnifies people's real deep mental illnesses. And we read this. But that's crazy.

That's marginal. That's unhastewing. People. Everything you see now. I mean, I've been annoying by. That's my original. Would be mainstream in the future. I have, I have an instruction written in the little instruction box

on Chatchy BT and Gemini. Please don't compliment me. Please don't tell me the question was a good question. Please don't tell me that's an amazing insight. Please don't tell me a good job for catching it. If I found out, if I figure out you're hallucinating, please just give me the words, the actual answer, the actual thing.

Now, can't we just program them not to? Is that what you're? talking about? I'm saying is that you're measuring... This thing will literally interact with me on the relationship level? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And not just if I'm mentally ill?

Some people, I mean, young people are already interacting with this, but it's not even designed for that yet. When this thing, it's really good, many people that you know, their best friend is going to be AI. Maybe even you, Kaviv, it's hard to predict. I mean, I think I'll never interact with this thing because I'm all telling the o'em and human, blah, blah. Maybe, you know what?

Maybe. I mean, today's teenagers, as Tristan Harris puts, are the first kids in the history of the world that their parents have. And there is a new problem. The best friend of my son is a robot. We no parents ever had that problem. Now, I'm just trying to think forward. When we have relationships with this thing, what will happen to our EQ? Because having relationships with real people is really hard.

because as there's a disciple of Zygman Ford, Stephen Mitchell, and he describes what it means to be human, we're yearning for human connection. Like not Viktor Frankil, we are searching for meaning, and not Aristotle and Rambam, we're searching for the truth, or Nietzsche and others. It's not the will for power. There's different definitions of what really, really draw,

what's the inner drive that pushes us through life? And Stephen Mitchell says, and I think this is so deep, human beings are yearning for connection. that's true. There's just another truth that needs to be added to this. We're also terrified from other human beings because we all have social anxiety

and we all have the fear of rejection and we all have what happens if they'll think I'm weird and what happens if they'll think of them stupid and all that noise we have in our heads simultaneously. So that's why we're ambivalent. We're yearning for connection and we have fear of connection. These future AIs are going to offer us a deal

that's way too good to satisfy all our social needs, press all our social buttons, offer us intimacy, offer us, and you know what, but without the fear of rejection. And when you'll be spending time with that, what will happen to you're not taking

your social capabilities to the gym. You're not taking your emotional capabilities to the gym. Chaviv, the Eliezer Yuduzkov speaks about the threat to humanity. This is a threat to human capabilities, to our IQ and to our EQ. We have superhuman power but subhuman capabilities. And that is a threat

that I think we have, that is a threat that is worth opening a real concrete conversation about. You, yeah, sorry. Well, because maybe here we have agency. You're describing the cartoon movie Wally where because robots do everything,

humans become fat and moving around on floating chairs and can't do anything for themselves. But social and spiritual and intellectual and intellectual. And that's already possible. That might now be happening to our kids, while we who still remember how to write and therefore how to think and how to formulate

and how to have a new idea once in a while are off over here not seeing. I'm not on TikTok. They're on TikTok. We live in two different universe, the two different cultures, There's two different potentially civilizational spaces. And I don't understand where my kids are and none of us do.

And that might be the future in ways that are really profound. You did an episode called, I think it was a Dan Anarchicism, the age of narcissism, that was about this question. And you suggested that that robot friend, it will, A, make you not want to socialize because other humans are messy and complex and have issues and problems. they give you this tremendous thing of connection, but they also demand from you, and the robot will demand from you nothing. It doesn't even have anything that you could give it. But also, the robot will have a relationship with you that is entirely premised solely on you and your

needs, and your needs will become the meaning of every relationship. It reminded me of a famous a little homily of the Kotska Rebbe that I often use, because my kids know this by heart, about what he called fish love. There's different kinds of love, he says. And when someone says, I love fish, what they mean is, I want to catch a fish and kill a fish and eat a fish.

They don't love fish. They love what the fish does for them. He love himself. And then there's real love. And so he said there's fish love and there's real love. Real love is I want for you. I want the thing that you want. I want it because you want it.

And that's a love that is about the other person. The other person is not the object of the love. It's the subject of the love. And that is an impossible relationship to have with an AI. It's only ever going to be fish love. And there won't be another version of love. And that's already, that's, we're all talking about the effect porn is having on young people. That's porn on steroids.

In terms of the psychology. If we remind menidian, we know that our personality is created by what we do. You become what you do. Just like any other skill. Playing basketball is about practicing. Playing the guitar is about practicing.

Writing is about practicing. Also being a mensch is about practice. Also, being altruistic is about practice. Also overcoming fish love and having real love. It's not about understanding what love is, about practicing. And what happens if we spend hours a day with fish love? You become what you do.

You turn into what you practice. And these are, so these are, these are, as opposed to the opening threats we opened with, these are things that are happening today. And, and it's hard to see them. They're enormous. They're strategic. Their culture destroying. Yes.

Mecha, this is going to kill us long before it subjugates us. It's going to kill our souls. And it's doing it now and we don't remember the world before it. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember the world before. We're products of the world before. We can still see these things. Are the kids going to see these things? Are they going to know about sacrifice?

Are they going to know about the dignity of giving? And the giving is not about you. It's actually about the person you're giving to. It depends about what we do now. It depends about what we do now. Because the last time we went through this, You mentioned the character of Wally, right? People not working out and losing their...

Last time we had this crisis, and it was this crisis, is with technologies that automated our muscles. And humanity went through a process where the rise of a white-collar job. That's a big deal. People used to go to the field and work in the field. The rise of the right-collar job is a big deal. and the rise of modern transportation.

People used to move with their body and they don't anymore. And they take the elevator. And finally, the automation of domestic chores like the washing machine, the dryer. We used to use our muscles.

And these three processes let the almost complete automation of your muscles. And that was utopia. Oh my God. We don't have to use our body anymore. we could rest and use only our minds. But then guess what happened?

Our muscles atrophied. And in the 1950s, 1960s, people discovered that, okay, this is a real problem. Our bodies are weakening. We are losing our health. And in 1960s, the first reaction begins, the jogging movement. Now, my dad is a product of the jogging movement. went to the 60s. I was raised in the 70s. My dad's American. I'm Israeli. I was, and I was observing him. When he was running, all his Israeli friends were like mocking him. They were like,

why are you? Why do you run? Why are you running? Like, if you have nowhere to go. If you're an athlete, if you're an athlete, if you're running it's because someone's chasing you, that's the only good reason to run or else. Late for a bus. Late for a bus. Right. And my dad was running. And now you go to Marathon, Yerushalayan, you go to Jewish La Mirathon. All, everyone's running. because something happened. In the 70s, the gyms were invented. And now we have, what was all this added up was to the sports culture.

Now, what is the sports culture? It's the way civilization responded to the autonomy, to technology, to the automation of our muscles, trying to say, we are not accepting the trade-off. It gives us power. It won't weaken our capacities. It's, what I call in Hebrew, it tarbout mefatsa.

Help me out here. It's a culture. Compensating culture. Compensatory culture. Compensatory culture. Compensatory culture. Okay, that works. Compensatory culture.

Where it gives you, it's a culture that gives back what technology took from you. And then you come out from this tradeoff on top. And this is, and everyone you know is part of the sports culture. I'll tell you why. All of your listeners are this sports. It's culture because either they work out or they know they don't work out. Their grandfather had no idea. I don't know who you're talking about.

I don't know what you're saying. Your grandfather or your great-grandfather. Now this podcast really got dark. Your great-falford. Never said, I'll start working out on Sunday. I should start working out. No, they didn't have that. Being a part of a culture means you have guilt.

That's what culture does. And that's what it does. that's how you know you're in a culture. And the sports culture, we're all, if you're in a white collar job and you're educated, you're in the sports culture and that is an achievement of modern Western civilization. And you understand where I'm taking this. There's a question. But how do you build that for this?

This is socialization, writing in a blank page without any more thing helping you. What does the new gymnasium look like? where you train your IQ where you have to write down your thoughts we have to think your thoughts where you have real conversations with people even though there's friction and there's awkwardness and there's cringe

and you still have to survive that and get through that because that's how you keep your human your human capabilities alive these are the question now I'm sure Chaviv that's 20 years from now we'll have these gymnasiums

I'm sure I mean if we first follow what happened to between automation of muscles and sports. This will happen with automation of our mental and cognitive muscles and the equivalent of sports. But many people in Israel are asking how do we start now? How do we

turn our schools into gymnasiums? And I mean this is also what I mean what we discuss on our Israeli podcast is that being the startup nation leading the world and technology in developing ideas for technology, that's not enough. We have to develop

We have to lead in developing the culture of how we, how we stay human, stay the best versions of ourselves in the age of technology. How do we create that culture? How do we do that? These are right now, I don't have answer to these questions. I just know that these are the questions. These are the questions we have to be asking ourselves. And I'm glad the opportunity to come up your podcast. So all your community of listeners will be able to also join us and ask.

this question. How do we not only protect humanity, which is very important from this arms race? How do we protect our Selim Elohim? Are those qualities that make us human from atrophing in the time that this technology could do everything for us? Okay. I want to pause

an answer to that question. A little bit self-crant. validating and congratulatory, but nevertheless, we know how to do this. We have this technology. Take large groups of people and through shifting their norms, their rituals, their daily lives, and their socialization and social demands fundamentally change their behavior across a long period of time and a large swath of a society. And it's called religion. We have tools to do this. and we have fundamentals shifts in ethics and in expectations, and we have ways that people plug into communities

that because they're costly are valuable. And we know how to do everything that you just described and conservative people know how to do it better than people who come from more progressive cultures which are founded intellectually or even as a cultural expectation on the deconstruction of things rather than on the preservation of old slow developing and extremely valuable because they were valuable for generations, social constructs. So is it crazy to say or is it a reasonable statement that if what we need now is some kind of model, vocabulary, social events, but structured social events expected, built into, you know, as one of those, you know, liminal,

periods of life like bar mitzvahs or marriages constructing a kind of social world in which we are required to think with no gadget in the room, in which we are required to socialize with no gadget in the room, and that that becomes something sacred, not literally religiously or theologically sacred, but culturally and socially sacred. And therefore is guaranteed to also continue and therefore people who don't want to do it or look down upon, so there's pressure to do it.

And so we create a kind of society that of its own volition builds out of, or what religion gives societies, these religions, builds out a capacity to train routinely, systematically, consistently to preserve those mental and social capabilities of humans against this threat of AI. Wouldn't conservative religious societies do better? Are Kharedim going to get through this much healthier than secular progressives, literally because they have that very thick socialization? So, let's think about this. Religious traditions are that gymnasium that I'm thinking about, or they could have that part. And let's think how this works.

I want to start with maybe they'll, I think that there'll be a renaissance of ancient traditions. There will be a renaissance. And because it will, this is how you preserve your humanity, right? Because this offers you practices and rituals. Just think about

the following. It forces us to meet face to face. It forces you to do that. Because the rituals don't work if you perform them alone. They're different religions. You and I let's speak about ours. Let's speak about it.

But ours. I don't, ours is an intellectual, textual religion. First of all, the idea of Bitt-Knesset. Right. Yeah. Now, that term, I'm saying it in Hebrew, because synagogue, I don't know if it captures it. Knesset means where people, Knesset, Miedchon Hitskonsuit. It's where people get together. House of Gathering is the literal conversion.

House of Gathering. And what makes it sacred, it's not its location. It, right? It's the fact that you're doing with other people. What makes it sacred is that there's a gathering. of 10. That's what makes it sacred. It doesn't, it works less. The ritual is not as effective. You don't do it with others.

So, so tradition literally forces you to interact with other people. And, and synagogue as American Grace, that great book, American Grace by Robert Putnam, Robert Putnam. Synagogue churches, that's where social capital is created.

That's where networks are created. It's a synagogue's churches. That's where, that creates an environment that enables for uninstrumental relationships to be created. Uninstitutional means I'm not your friend to achieve something. I'm just with you for the sake of being with you. That's its own. As it came to church. Right.

That's right. We're just hanging out. And now a car dealership where I'm buying a car. That's right. That's right. And we're all witnessing each other's life. I think that's the definition of a community. A group of people that are witnessing each other's life.

Yivalo O'allali has this. definition of a group of people to gossip about each other. You have to care a lot about other people in order for spreading information about them to be fun. So have a more elegant definition as a group of people that are witnessing each other. And as, what's her name? Tanya Marie Lurman, I think, from Stanford or from Princeton. I always can share is that it's not that communities perform rituals is that rituals create communities.

Because if there's a ritual and we all do it, perform it together after 40 times, we'll start gossiping about each other. We'll start caring about each other. We'll start witnessing each other's life. And when you go to Shul and Shabbat, you know, okay, that guy has a son

is his bar mitzvah, and that person has a father that's sick. And there is a system where you know about each other's life now. So is, and that is, that is a gym. The fact that you're forced to read and someone has to deliver a sermon, that might be a piece of this. But finally, I think one of the reasons why, oh, by the way, the idea of Shabbat itself.

I had a conversation with a group of rabbis, reform, conservative, orthodox the whole thing, and I asked, can we agree on one thing in the age of AI? I should do this more often. That we all practice halakhah differently. can we agree on one thing that Shabbat is a day where you're human, a day with stripped from AI. You have to develop a thought, brainthorn with the guy next to you. You're searching for a metaphor.

You have to, like, because, by the way, because chapter, by the way, chapter one in Genesis, describes in the day six human beings are created in the image of God and then Shabbat comes in. Can the modern reading of this being that Shabbat is there to protect, or Tsele, Elohim, by activating it, by creating a space of time where you can't. So all these are very important ideas.

And finally, I want to say, I predict, I want to make a prediction that in the age of AI, traditions will be more valuable, not only because they preserve humanity, but also because, you see, everything that AI could produce will lose its value. Now that includes books. that might include the podcast,

Chaviv, sorry. No, whoa, hey. It will be so real. It will be, and it will be movies, by the way,

if you're an actor now, if you're a producer, if you're this, like, like, it could be the best, music, my God, AI,

I produce, amazing music. And we're living in a world where there's a law of physics. Anything that's great is where. And that's what makes it valuable. And today, great music,

great movies. great books might become not where. So the inflation of all this stuff and all this stuff will lose its value. So what will still have value? Anything that can't be produced by AI. And you know what AI can't produce? Time.

Time. Think about this way. You can't ask Chazimiti, create an hour, create music, create whatever you want, and it will get better at this. I mean, I'm a lot of skeptics saying, no, can't ever be Stephen Spielberg. Well, maybe it could one day.

But it can't ever create a month. Now, because it can't create time, things that their value comes from the fact that they exist a long time, those things will be much more valuable in the future. So, Jerusalem, traditions, rituals, things that they're, I mean, even the Tamach, the Bible. Like Yvonneur-N-Wa-Rari, once I read,

he said, well, AI will produce the next Bible. Well, I think Yuval Gart-Rar. because I mean I love you Valde's also we have a relationship but I think he got this wrong I think what makes the Bible a great book is not only the fact that it's a brilliant and it is and it's an amazing book

but maybe AI could produce even a bet maybe could produce a better Bible but the Bible's value the fact that for over 2,500 years people are attached to it and when you read the Bible you're joining a community of multi-generational a community that's multi-generational.

And that value created by time, AI can't create time, which means that traditions become something where something that can't be, that's value can't be inflated. So for all these reasons, Chaviv, yeah, I'm with you, I think that paradoxically,

in a world that's more futuristic, the past has much more value. We'll have like the equivalent of the Renaissance, where the ancient past comes back to life, maybe to preserve our humanity to offer us things that this hyper AI world can't offer us this is a very interesting space

this is a very interesting if AI is self-preservational AI is not going to tell us to go seek other humans and so other humans things that are long in time well I'm married in 2008

I should have known that faster. That's a long time. And that's a valuable, powerful thing. And your relationship with your parents and your children, those are the long time things. And that's the precious thing that you have. And what else do you have? You have a job, you have a rent or a mortgage.

What else do you have? That's the thing that you have. And if you don't remember that, AI will take away everything else. the economy is going to fundamentally change in ways that who knows where the money even comes from. Who knows what money even means when we no longer spend on entertainment. We no longer spend on so many things and half the jobs are gone. I don't know. Nobody knows.

Nobody exactly knows. Nobody even vaguely knows. And so the things that don't depend on those things. The fish love is always up for grabs. The real love is the only thing left. There's something else at the religion offers. Is this too much for it? Can you go further?

No, go for it. One more thing. Anybody can turn this off anytime they want. You and can schmose forever. Yes. And that is... The idea of singularity means that the pace of change is so quick.

We can't close our eyes and imagine the future. Now, today, it used to be like the year of the ninth century, you could close your eyes and imagine the next century. And then after the Industrial Revolution, you know, you can't imagine the next century. You could probably imagine the next decade, like 10 years and you could imagine. And then things change so quickly.

Like, we can't imagine next 10 years from now. But I think many of us could think they could imagine next year. But pretty soon we can't imagine next year, not next month, not tomorrow. That's the meaning of singularity, I think, that the pace of change is so much that we lose our ability to think and imagine the future and prepare for the future. And that changes everything. And it creates a lot of anxiety.

But even in the age of singularity, here's one thing that I have no idea. And you know what? This is probably already true. If I'm honest, if I'm truly brutally honest, I know that next year, I have no idea what's going to happen. I have no idea.

Like, post-October 17, know that anything could happen all the time and the world is becoming, the pace of change is so great. Like, so I have no idea how Israeli or world politics will look like. I have no idea how the economy will look like. I have no idea what new technology will.

I have no idea. But I know what Sukkot will look like. I know what Pesach will look like. I know what Shavu will look like. The Pesach, I know how the Sukha will look like. There's the law that tells me how to build the sukkah. So what... Religion gives you experience of cyclical time when time goes linear.

Meaning you have islands that are familiar to you. and a future that's unfamiliar to you. Like I have no idea who will be the prime minister and how the politics and anything yet in Hanukkah, but I know what Hanukkah will look like. We'll sing, we'll put the candles, I know. So it gives you an islands that are familiar in territory that's radically unfamiliar, because that's singularity.

It turns the future into radically unfamiliar territory. And by the way, this is what this conversation is about. We are already in unfamiliar territory, and we're the first ones to step in this territory and no one was ever here before us to tell us what we do here. And the idea of the gym and protecting humanity and all that, this is us trying to figure,

being the first people to figure this out. The first ones. And we'll get this wrong and we have to trial and error. I think Israel has a role here, by the way. In creating, this is by the way, Heltzels, vision for the future of the Jewish state is to be the laboratory,

developing the knowledge of how to create a society that knows how to live with technology that brings the best out of technology and the technology brings the best from them. And that's why this... That's everywhere in Hurtzliang. That's everywhere in Hurtzli.

That's healthy. I mean, nobody feels... Idealistic element. I keep teaching his, you know, expectation of catastrophe, but there's a lot of idealism there. He wrote two books. He wrote the expectation of catastrophe in Judenstadt in 1896,

and he writes his utopia, but his utopia is not religious Zionism and not socialist Zionism. It's about how can we develop knowledge for the world of how we live, how we create the institutions that could coexist with technology.

And I think trust now, with AI, that's the version of Zionism that just became very interesting and very relevant. Daftka in a world, there's a crisis of the idea of Zionism. We're going to leave it there. this went on much longer than either of us expected. We've had preliminary conversations and I listened to the podcast, to your podcast,

and I still learned a lot and walked through a, I feel like a vast landscape. The world is ending, so everyone should get religion, I think, is the takeaway, right? Did I get that wrong? Mika, thank you so much. We are in a weird way. The cutting edge of this, the front line of this, the United States and China. There are a handful of countries,

a very small number that are alongside the big ones, the giant ones, major pieces of the architecture and infrastructure of AI of those larger countries. Israel is one of them. The Google R&D in Israel, the meta R&D in Israel, there's just one after another after another. Invidia is in Israel. And Israel is therefore, it really is a kind of sluha.

Now I'm losing my English. It's a kind of branch of this American industry. It's not, you know, but nevertheless, it is very much with them at the cutting edge. And so there's some piece to it. We're not Americans. They're the ones building this thing, inventing this thing alongside, you know, the advances of the Chinese, which are a little bit more mysterious to us all. But we're certainly part of it. So I don't know what the future brings, but I feel like I finally know what questions to ask.

Thank you so much, Micha. I think that was awesome. I have no idea what's about to happen, and I still don't understand what the hell an AI is. But an intelligence is coming for us. We don't know if it'll be benign or not, and we need to be at least prepared to at least know who we are when it happens.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Kavif.