Technology, Connected - How Information Systems Shape Truth and Power: Yuval Noah Harari on Religion, Books and AI

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

In Chapter 4 of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari examines how information systems shape belief, authority and our understanding of truth.Mark and Jeremy discuss how religious texts, books and institutions created durable systems for organising knowledge and legitimising power. They also examine the difference between traditions that claim access to unquestionable truth and the scientific method, which treats human error as unavoidable and correction as essential.In this episode, we discuss:How religious narratives create legitimacy and political authorityWhy written texts transformed the control and transmission of knowledgeHow books became tools for preserving doctrine and enforcing beliefWhat the Oracle of Delphi reveals about information and powerHow witch hunts emerged from collective belief and institutional reinforcementWhy false narratives can persist even when evidence is weakHow the scientific method changed society’s approach to truthWhy admitting error is central to reliable knowledge systemsWhat historical information networks can teach us about AI and algorithmsHow automated systems could strengthen or distort modern narrativesHarari’s argument is that information systems don’t merely describe reality. They also create the stories, institutions and categories through which people interpret it.This conversation examines what religion, books, witch trials and science reveal about the relationship between truth and power, and what those lessons mean in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Book Lovers(00:32) Shakespeare(01:53) The most important function of religion(02:19) Upsetting the catholic church(03:22) Fear, security and mechanisms of control(04:28) The Big Lebowski(05:11) God, religion and self-correcting errors(06:26) The Oracle Of Delphi(08:10) The Russian Doll / Telephone Game(09:04) Bible building by committee(11:31) The Ship Of Theseus (13:47) The role of women in church(15:52) Idiot Human(17:00) Heinrich Kramer and the birth of witch hunting(19:39) Satanic Conspiracy(23:44) Science and the discovery of ignorance(25:55) Parenting Lessons from science(31:24) To understand AI, do you have to understand religion?(35:00) Self-learning V self-correcting(39:04) Will AI ever have EGO?--Learn more: www.thinkingonpaper.xyz Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUBij_kyIEc&ab_channel=ThinkingOnPaper

Disruptors and Curious Minds, CEOs, founders, booklovers. Welcome to the Thinking on Paper Book Club, where we read between the lines of books that have stood the test of time, books that will change your mind. We are the rebellion to the 15-minute book summary. We are a bastion of critical thinking. And we're on book six of Book Club. We're reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari.

And like last week, and like every week going forward, I'm going to start with some Shakespeare and then Jeremy's going to guess what play it's from. I'm bad Shakespeare. Actually, a sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap and munched and munched and munched. Give me, quote I, Aroint thee, which the rump-fed Royans cry,

her husband's to Aleppo gone, master of the tiger. But in a sieve, I'll thither sail And like a rat without a tail, I'll do, and I'll do, and I'll do. I'm going to rhyme and say, Taming of the Shrew. It's Macbeth. It's the witches.

I told you I was bad at Shakespeare, man. I'm not above admitting that. By the end of this book club, you're going to know, because for every episode I'm going to try and get a bit of Shakespeare that's relevant to the chapter that we're reading. And obviously that was Act 1, Scene 3 of Macbeth with the witches. And I just did a little date check written 1606, 1607, so in the midst of...

midst of, yeah. What we're going to talk about at some point in a bit in the book club, right way, so yeah. Witches. But no, we're not going to start. Chapter 4, Jeremy, before we get to witches. First take. First take.

I'm going to tell you where this sent me right off the bat. I think it was like in the first, second or third paragraph, something like that. Quote, the most important function of religion is to provide superhuman legitimacy. for social order. I'm going to read that one more time. The most important function of religion is to provide superhuman legitimacy for social order. All right, here's where I went.

I'm going to... Are you going to upset the Catholic Church today, Jeremy? There's a slight possibility of that. All right, so I read this book. This is another book called Total Freedom. I don't know if you can... It's kind of focusing. Total Freedom.

Judeo Christian Marti. essential writings of a man the Dalai Lama described as one of the greatest thinkers of the age. All right. So this guy was anointed like when he was really young to be this, be this prophecy of this religious sect. And they figured out, hey, this guy was going to be the dude. He was like 10 years old or something. And he kind of got into it and went, no, no, no, no. I'm not the dude.

like I'm not like this anointed one and then he just started doing his own talks and figuring things out on his own and what I've learned from this book largely is what that first sentence is it's just like not just religious institutions but large organizations are are a mechanism of control and the way they control is by by feeding off of this fear of insecurity thing that happens with with humans right we want to feel secure and we're scared when we're not secure and we look to lean on things uh to feel more secure so immediately that this i mean this is one of my favorite books i'd totally recommend anyone reading this um but as for my head lance with this with this thing at first sentence that sentence is powerful man and it's like i'm not saying you know I'm not saying if you believe in a certain type of religion that I'm calling you wrong. I'm just calling this really interesting that this author has this position on religion as we are talking about stories that scale stories that are used to organize large groups of people in action.

Sorry, when you said, I'm not the dude for all our Big Lebowski fans out there. I just couldn't stop thinking of the Big Loboski. I'm the dude. You're the dude. Quick on that. So my eighth grader, my eighth grader always wears a robe. Like, always wears a robe. And I'm like, you are the dude. He's like, what are you talking about? And we're going to watch the movie together. I showed him pictures. He goes, oh, I get it. Well, I digression. But the dude has become a religious symbol for some people. Jedi, Star Wars, like these quasi-religious movies.

have built up around these very non-deity symbols like the dude. But yeah, in order to function, self-correcting mechanisms need legitimacy. If humans are prone to error, how can we trust the self-correcting mechanisms to be free from error? He talks about, yeah, superhuman legitimizes social order, as you've just said. God is infallible. So he speaks a lot in Chapter 4 about religion and how religion came to be because was it possible to bypass humans? Humans are prone to ever was a way to bypass humans.

And then as society became more complex, the religious systems built on it became more and more complex. And he gives us quite a deep, quite a nice, quite good. I enjoyed it breakdown of how the Bible came to be. And it was very interesting. I don't know how much you learned from that, but I found it. I learned a ton. I learned a ton. No, it really was.

And in this idea of, you know, humans, you know, being prone to error, right? And in, you know, stories kind of extending and coming from humans. So how do we know what is imagination and invention and what is truth? And what the hell is truth? Right. What the hell is truth kind of in general? You start thinking about that. But a good example of humans being prone to error. I enjoyed the story. about the Oracle of Delphi actually being bribed or potentially being bribed, right? So this is this is this temple that people would go to to ask the biggest questions, the greatest, the most trusted entity, I think, back in a certain age, was actually, according to the author, bribed by a certain political system. Like, this shit's been happening for a long time. It's not new. Like, this stuff is not new.

Well, it's the meme, same shit, different day. Yeah, was it, with Delphi in the time of the Greek gods? Yeah. A long, long time ago. And that kind of bribery, in the story of these religious texts, there was almost a, what, the long and the short. of it or the short of it, I don't know, is that basically these religious books are a lot shorter than they could be, because lots and lots and lots of letters and documents and texts, which were not

included because the men at the time between themselves kind of decided what was going to go in the book and what wasn't going to go in the book. And over the centuries, this thing, and there's a very nice summary I found, which on page 91, that was skipping ahead a little bit, but I'll read it because it still makes me laugh. Catholic information experts such as Jacques Fournier spent their days reading Thomas Aquinas interpretation of Augustine's interpretation of St. Paul's epistles and composing additional interpretations of their own. All those interrelated texts didn't represent reality. They created a new information sphere, even bigger and more powerful than that created by the Jewish rabbis. Medieval Europeans were cocooned inside that information sphere. Their daily

activities, thoughts, and emotions shaped by text, about text, about text. It's like this Russian doll. It's the telephone game. It's the telephone game. The same thing. Russian doll telephone game, the whole nine yards, right? Well, let's run down this, this journey, this, this, this, the beats of the story of the Bible and books like it that were actually created by committee, believe it or not. At least according to this author, you know, we haven't done, I haven't done extensive research to prove what Harari is saying, but I'm going to trust him in his footnotes because we're in the context of his book. All right. So here we are. Religion coming together. Mark and I want to bypass humans because we're

throw into error. So hey, let's write something, let's write something down and capture it in something that is beyond us, something that isn't us, that isn't me saying it, something that I can point to that you can point to, here are the rules of the road, right? So that's what a book is. And books are different than documents, which was really, he talked about this a little bit, right? Documents are usually kind of a single copy of something, right? And books are many copies. And he talked about this being an important religious technology. That's like, how can a book be technology? But when you think about it, it was like one of the original technologies and the dissemination of information and information that was controlled by an entity. It's the entity wants you to, uh, know a certain

thing in a certain way. They put it in a book. That's the way. right? Yeah. He mentions the blockchain analogy with different nodes around the world. The book democratizes knowledge. It democratizes information. In theory, it can't be erased because there's copies all over the place. They all tell the same story.

They're all identical. Obviously, it didn't quite work out like that, did it? But that was, was that the thinking? I think with this, it was probably just stumbled. Society stumbled upon it. I don't think there was much thought going into, I know, we can democratize. knowledge and recreate these things. I think it was just this natural progression of

culture. Baby, who knows? Who knows? The one thing I did chuckle at the sentence, the Bible didn't exist in biblical times. It's kind of, it's kind of funny, right? Because you think like, you think like it's it's always been kind of the rules of the road, right? But it like, it wasn't while those, while it was being compiled, right? Like there was no, there was no rules of the road as said in the Bible, right? Um, and then, Have you heard of the ship of the ship of Theseus, the thought experiment where... No, hit me. What do you got? The ship of Theses, you have a boat, you build a boat, something breaks on the boat, you replace it, and then you keep replacing it, and you keep replacing it.

And at what point does the boat not represent the original boat? And at what point does the Bible, these books, they change so much over time because people add and take away? away and add and take away and change and change and interpret interpret at what point does it no longer represent what it began as all right so point to the atoms in your body that allegedly change 97% of them every year right are you really you but let's not go down to that rabbit hole let's stay in the books um all right so this collection of stories uh created by committee um here's some interesting things that um that that i saw in here like allowing certain information to be the information, right?

So if we fast forward, like to today, there's a guy named Tim Wu who wrote a book called The Master Switch, really. And he also coined something called net neutrality, which is, you know, the idea of, like, whoever controls the pipes of the internet, you know, can control the information that goes over the pipes of the internet is kind of the concept. But think about this, like the role of women in society today. I think no matter who you are, you could argue that unbelievably, they are still put in a position where they're made to feel inferior, whether it's in the workforce, whether it's intellectually, whether it's whatever. I mean, there are examples of it that happen all the time.

My wife and I talk about this a lot. Like we had an electrician come to the house the other day to do some repair work. She called him. She set up the appointment. And I was here when it all went, you know, when you got here. So, of course, I go to the door and I introduce myself. And, you know, she's talking. And the guy immediately just started talking directly to me and totally ignored Tracy.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no. She'll tell you what's up. Like, she made the appointment. Like, she's the one to pay attention to here. And that's just a little example. But pulling back to the story about the role of women in church, and one interpretation of that story went viral, so to speak. This idea, the first epistle of Timothy, quote,

a woman should learn in quietness and in full submission, right? So that's the version that went in to the Bible instead of this story about Thicla, St. Paul's disciple, who is allegedly a revered Christian saint performing miracles, doing all these wonderful things as a woman. But does that get in the Bible? No, this other thing gets in the Bible because I'm not even going to, you know, let's just think about why that may have made it in the Bible versus the story of think. I don't know. What do you think?

Come to your own conclusions on that. I think it's, yeah, that bit was very powerful and, you know, I wrote the question, yeah, what would society, what would life or would culture look like had one chapter in a book been replaced by another? and the consequences of that choice and the consequences of those decisions that those men made is pretty

incredible. Well, the man in the high castle that show, we should write something together that basically swaps these two passages in and see what happens in the world. That would be really interesting. It would be a good show. Shame, it's been so happy, though.

Yeah, I know. Right. So, all right, let me throw this at you, Mark. So we create the book. The book is this, you know, objective third party interpretation or rules of the road that aren't coming from me. They aren't coming from you. They're coming from the book. So, hey, we've succeeded in bypassing the error prone humans, right? We've got the book. But now, guess what? All of a sudden, there are other people that claim to not really understand the book or maybe don't want to. to read the book. So now we have to interpret the book for them. So now we're going around and we're interpreting what this book means instead of them looking at the book objectively and saying, well, hey, how do I, how do I feel about this? So in short-circuiting the error-prone nature of humans, we've reintroduced ourselves into the equation. Is that backwards or what? Didn't see that one coming, did they? That's like the most obvious twist in. any film you've ever seen.

It's like, ah, we're going to take humans out of the equation and disseminate these books all over the place. And who's writing his books? Who's editing these books? Oh, we are. Oh, shit. Didn't see that come in. And yet, but his whole, I like what he's doing.

The book, it ties back to the introductory chapter, doesn't it? Like, how do you deal this naive view of information that you add information to a situation? and it makes it better. It leads to truth. And it doesn't, does it? It's wrong. And then he uses, after moving on from these example, he moves to early Europe and witches.

And a pretty, pretty bonkers story about Heinrich Kramer. Good Lord, right? Yeah. So this guy creates essentially the how to. book to frame confessions of witchcraft through torture and then how to kill people who have been. But before that, he was debunked, not debunked, but like before that, he went to the Tyrol in Austria and he tried to hunt some witches and the general consensus.

Well, hold on, Henrik, this isn't, you know, no, this isn't, this isn't right. And he got ousted, didn't he? And he wrote a book. Like the dummies guide to killing witches almost, didn't he wrote this stupid book? And it took off and became like the bestselling book in Europe. Because it's for the same reason people today love true crime shows, love like, you know, the stories of bad people doing bad shit. It's like that that probably was one of the reasons why it got absorbed because people's curiosity into that. It's the gutter press.

It's the gutter press. the daily mail, it's the TikTok. It's like, it's a precursor to this dump of, dump of information that we're living in today. And he was, he was the first, one of the first. And we, and we laugh at it, but it was actually pretty, I bet it was pretty damn scary, like, back in the day, like for people, like, subscribe. So we think about this. Let's talk about intersubjective realities. We're, we're going back to, like, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. So these are like, these are realities created by stories, you know, that, that turn into someone really believing that they're that they are something, right?

And it wasn't just him. It wasn't just Heinrich. It was some other folks, too. But what did the church do, though? Like, after, okay, the murals. It gave him a job. Like, so they gave, I don't know what a papal representative is, but papal means Pope. So, like, someone really freaking high up was like,

I think highly enough of you to make you a representative to the Pope. Oh, and also you can be an official inquisitor to people who don't believe in Catholicism because you did such a good job of getting rid of witches. We want to also bring you in to get rid of people that don't believe in our stories. Holy, like. And it was like QAnon still references this. It's kind of like it's actually still today used as this satanic, conspiracy

book that supports a lot of that. It was brutal. It was at the witch hunts and the witch trials. It was brutal. The middle ages, oh my God. Just. What happened to be all right? Ugly middle age guys were all right, I think.

We'd have been okay. Man. Unless, yeah, unless, you know, unless you had a, unless you had a book club that talked opposite points of what are commonly held beliefs. Like maybe we end up in the wrong spot of this. But so my French is terrible, but is it Henri Boge?

Or is that just Henry Boggett? Like, you tell us this is a guy, it's close to the Heinrich story, but I don't know exactly what page, but this is a guy who was a judge, who was a judge and witch hunter. Like he was a judge and he was a witch hunter And what he I don't know how you get that dual role But it's when intersubjective realities become realities to people so this this guy puts out that he speculates that 1.8 million people in Europe are witches

And we need to be scared of them and it fueled this frenzy of like that led to the deaths of like 50,000 people And again, this is according to the book that we're reading Nexus and Harare's research and analysis. But man, that was like, wow, super scary, man. It was super scary. And it was, I think your pronunciation of his name was correct. Henry Bogot? Well, yeah, I'm sure it's that.

No, it's a German guy as well, the Prince Bishop of Berzberg, who wrote a letter to a friend. So he's the Prince Bishop. Again, I don't know what role that is hierarchically in the system, but he was a pretty important dude. And the power of this intersubjective reality of witches was so, because he was a smart guy, obviously, he'd been thinking about this. But even though he'd been thinking about it, he still couldn't, he still couldn't trust himself to think it was rubbish. I'll read a bit of his letter. It's quite a lot. That letter was crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. As to the affair of the witches, it started up afresh. and no words can do it justice. Oh, the woe and the misery of it. There are still 400 in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly accused that they may be arrested at any hour. The Prince Bishop has over 40 students, who are soon to be pastors,

among them 13 or 14, are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested. Two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our church, consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to the torture. In a word, a third part of the city is surely involved. The richest, most attractive, most prominent of the clergy are already executed. A week ago, a maiden of 19 was executed, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city,

and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the best and most attractive persons, and thus many are put to death for renouncing God and being at the witch dances against whom nobody has ever spoken a word. So he's got a bit of a problem with it. But then at the end he goes, but they're dancing with the devil up on the hill outside of town. Kill them.

Yeah. It's mad. He works through his own like, a little attempt at critically thinking about an intersubjective reality. And it's kind of like, this is actually kind of bad and it's kind of scary. But you know what? They're all dancing in the hills.

So we should probably, yeah, it's too much. It's too much. scary scary scary stuff all right so let's let's talk about i love this collection of words the discovery of ignorance like yo that that's kind of awesome right um and this is where science kind of takes over and science kind of comes in and says all right we're going to embrace that we are error prone and we are going to lean on a a collective self-correcting mechanism right that you know, in peer review journals, you know, that where things get pushed around and rewarding the idea of self-scepticism. So this is, this is kind of the opposite. This is not what we're

talking about previously. There's no self-correcting mechanism in there, right? To go, wait a minute. Yeah, this is not working. We need to, we need to stop doing this thing. But some of the best pieces of science, the best moments in science have actually been when, you know, Max Planck and And, you know, Heisenberg and all of those folks kind of said, hey, Newtonian physics doesn't apply to everything. And that was like, whoa, Newtonian physics was like the thing, right? Yeah, the whole thing was built on this infallibility. It was celebrated error and mistake was actually good. It should be embraced.

And whereas the book and the religious books hadn't worked that out, along come science, and ignorance. I think, I think, so in my own life, I think about, and I try to teach my kids this, the idea of like admitting that you're wrong in a situation, you know, so I'll give this example. So like maybe my kids have done something that frustrated me and in the moment I got upset and I yelled at him, right? I yelled at him for one reason or another. And, you know, hey, go to your room. and because I yelled, I lost my cool, I'm upset, they're upset, and I know I did the wrong thing. The easy thing to do would just be like, I'm going to leave it alone or whatever, but the right

thing to do is to go back, which I try to do as often as I can go back to my kids to say, hey, look, you know, what you did wasn't right, but my response to it, me yelling, you know, is not the right thing to do, and I'm sorry for doing that. And doing that is very freeing. It's very liberating, but it's difficult to do. I think we can take a lesson from science in applying that to how we interact with the world as individuals, don't you? Totally, totally. And I think that in stark contrast to the church who never take responsibility for their mistakes and their errors. And they can't, they have an infallible garden and to say, look, the church is wrong, the book is wrong, is to, they can't.

They can't really, that sounds so weak, say they can't do that, but they can't do that because that means God is wrong. So rather than, say, holding up their hands and say, okay, we've been wrong about women, we've been wrong about homosexuality, we've been wrong about pedophilia. And then they blame a priest or they blame a few people. They don't blame the structure of what they've created. So it's passing the book, isn't it? And like you said with your kids, you never want to do that you want to hold up your hands and take responsibility for your actions and they can't do that whereas science can well that's why yeah that that that's the that's the big thing because the the structure that the doctrine is is never wrong because if you admit that the doctrine might not be

right then it inserts a whole load of doubt and in just the house of cards comes tumbling down right um so the way that is circumvented is like oh this priest uh interpreted uh interpreted the doctor in the wrong way or this this this individual acted upon the doctrine in in the wrong way whereas example in science the DSM I think it's referred to in in psychiatry it's like basically the the the manual the master of life of psychological diseases right is that diseases right and in 1952 being gay was a sociopathic disorder in 1952 in this book right and you know less than 20 years later in 1974, they're like, whoa, this isn't right. You know, this needs to be, this needs to be removed.

So they removed that label on that. So, I mean, that took a long, relatively long time when you think about 1952 or 1974, but when you think about it in the scheme of hundreds of years and in lifetimes and all of that, you know, that's a relatively quick self-adjusting mechanism. Agreed. but but oh go ahead but no but but do that's follow your but

well let's yeah so so let's look at another document right another you know version of the DSM so if you looked at this I'm not pronouncing this correctly but dumb der vass

diversus dumb diversus doom diversus bull basically the statement that was issued by the church, that you can invade and murder people who don't believe in our book and the interpretations of it.

So that, to me, if there was a self-correcting mechanism, it would be like, yeah, we need to have that knot in this thing. That doesn't sound right. Like if we look at all the other things that we want to do as good people, that doesn't seem aligned with that. But there's no self-correcting mechanism in that.

That led to the Crusades, a bunch of other things, right? Yeah, nothing, nothing on rule about the Crusades, I don't think. They've messed that one up, didn't they? Tying, I want to tie this all back to the age of AI, artificial intelligence. What do you think he's getting at? He's painting this picture. He's giving us this background. chapter after chapter, he's saying, what do you think at the moment he's trying to tell us

about our official intelligence? I think the history of religion was kind of this case study to set up, you know, what potentially could be appropriate guardrails and systems and procedures and that sort of thing to deal with AI in the future. I think it's a good case study. I think it's a good case to kind of say, all right, well, you know, it leads back to like what is truth. So, you know, what models are you trusting? Okay. Well, what, what information are those models based off of, right? And can you have a self-correcting mechanism in there that basically says, yeah, this isn't serving the model well, you know, and can people manipulate those models? Certainly, right? So I think it puts my head in an interesting spot going, okay, anytime you look at the past and you can

kind of go, you can kind of match things and bridge the past, the future. Shout out to Julio Otino again, who we shout out pretty much every book club in his book, The Nexus, talking about bridging the past to the present to understand the future, right? That's what I think about it. What is the history of religion as presented by Harari set you up for understanding AI? Like, where does it put you? He says himself, doesn't he, in the chapter that if you want to understand AI, you have to understand religion because we're so susceptible. And I think the witchcraft story is further exemplifies just how we're suckers.

And he keeps going on about this naive view of information. and I think he forewarning the dangers of infinite access to infinite information has been proven again and again throughout history that that is not the path to wisdom, to knowledge, to truth, to reality and at the risk of repeating myself, we run the risk of repeating what has gone before. So I almost see it as I also like the idea of just how normalized incredibly evil behavior was in the past. Now, I think the collective condition can move on. So that kind of, well, who knows, but shouldn't be so easily normalized.

And with so much misinformation and so much disinformation, again, we wouldn't have risk of. But guardrails, you mentioned guardrails, the ethics part of it. So I think where I was going with my point with everything normalized was so bad. And if even and then 50 years ago being gay was in a book saying it's a mental disorder, how can we trust the guardrails we put on today will be relevant in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. But then with AI, people always say you've only got one shot at this. So if we instill the guardrails now and, oh, we're wrong, what happens then? and there's lots to think about.

It's pretty heavy shit, dude. Like when you think about it, it's like, it's like, all right, if you compare building the systems to, to handle governance and proper use of a technology so potentially powerful as AI with the same creation by committee of the Bible, right? So you get this group together and we're all sitting around and we're like, okay, this thing needs to stay in, this thing needs to come out, this, this and that. How do we make sure like the representation of what actually is right happens? I don't think, like, are we even capable of doing that's exactly what is happening?

Are we capable of that as like humans? Like, are we capable of like collectively creating? creating mutually beneficial guardrails for all humans. It's like, I don't know, man. Well, history would say no, but then maybe, how do you think about self-learning versus self-correcting? Because everyone's speaking about self-learning algorithms, self-learning language models.

Okay, so soon, if not already, these models will be self-learning. But self-learning isn't the same as, self-correcting, but by self-learning, will it learn to self-correct? Will it implement in its own guardrails? Are we, in fact, kind of nudging the AI to create its own guardrails? Yeah, so I could speak to this from like a human side. I can't speak to the, you know, as from an AI, unless I'm, unless I'm a spun-up AI agent and we're all in a giant simulation anyway.

So if we think about self-learning, I think, requires a genuine curiosity. And learning means learning all sides to a subject, learning all aspects to the subject, to critically think and have an opinion about it. I think self-correcting requires a, and again, this is from a human aspect. I don't know how you tie this into, you know, code and AI and stuff, but it's a recognition of ego as not serving the best of you, right? So if I'm wrong about something and my ego's leading the process forward, I'm not going to admit that I'm wrong because I don't want to admit that I'm wrong. My ego is protecting me. but if I acknowledge my ego and I go, man, maybe I did, maybe I didn't act the right way in this situation.

Maybe I need to pull my ego back and really think. And that's when self-correction can happen. I don't know. Can we code? Do we have any coders that can take what I just said and put it into code and start throwing it at language models? Can AI have an ego? Well, that was my question. Do AIs have ego?

and if they don't, can they self-learn to have an ego? Are we learned to have an ego? Are we born with an ego? That's it. I think it's part biological. I think some aspects of it are biological because... Well, Freud would tell no, but... It had to do with self-preservation, I think.

So... We get, we are getting deep. We're getting deep. I would assume that... Assume, you know what they say about assumptions? been the mother of all fuck-ups. I would assume that AI doesn't have an ego right now. I might be

having an ego involves some kind of self reflection, dare I say the word consciousness. Oh my. So can you otherwise if you don't have, can you have an ego? If you don't have consciousness, can you fake an ego?

Could they learn to portray something which is deemed as ego and then they do that all the time. They do that all the time, don't know, all their behaviors are mimic. They're not really, yeah, they're not really feeling empathy for you when you're asking it how I, how I feel. They're not really demonstrating love, interest, whatever these, are they?

It's all an act. So maybe they can, maybe they'll convince themselves that they do have an ego and they should act as if they have an ego. What's the guardrail for that? Oh, thank you. So this is a, by the way, this. This is a banger of a book club episode for, I mean, for the people watching and listening and, you know, Mark and I are having a blast, as we always do. Would love your thoughts and ideas.

You know, even if you're not watching this live, pop them in the comments. You know, we always jump through and respond. Would love to have some dialogue, some great discourse about some of this stuff we're trying to understand by actively, actively unpacking it in front of you guys. So yeah. Does AI have ego? I think that is a question we should maybe leave for people to dwell on as, I use the word dwells like AI. Yeah, we'll leave that question.

Do you think AI has or will ever have an ego? And if it does, what does that mean? Tell us your thoughts. Pop up down here. Ooh, hey, we got one. Let's see. Ooh, let's pop Alexandra up here. Let's see.

But if they're built to mimic humans, I'd imagine they'd mimic the human language as well and pick up on ego. Egoistic language. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, they learn by, you know, they learn by mimicking, right? So all behavior can be can be mimicked. Yeah, super interesting. Yeah, if they're self-learning everything from their data sets, then the good and the bad and the ugly is in that data set.

So how, what are the guard rails to differentiate between what to take on board and what to leave out? Yeah. So Alexandra, yes, unfortunately, the live version of this is, is getting ready to end. As my grandfather would say, we're getting ready to land the plane on chapter, is this chapter five or chapter four? Chapter four. We've got chapter five coming out.

The good news is, Alexander, you'll be able to jump on YouTube and, watch this and listen to it. I think you could hit a replay too on LinkedIn Live with that. You can, yeah, and on YouTube. And yeah, get ready for chapter five, which I have to religion and witchcraft and whether AI has consciousness and an ego. Chapter five, decisions, a brief history of democracy and totalitarianism. And to leave you on a note, decisions, you know, humans make,

according to research I saw 33,000 to 35,000 decisions a day. So we're overloaded. Steve Jobs got around decision fatigue by wearing the same pair of jeans and mock turtlemec every day, save brain capacity for other things. So decisions is what we're going to talk about at the top of the year. This is the last book club episode of 2024. It's been a blast. We're going to continue the back half of this book.

thinking on paper. Y, Z. If you're reading this book, we'll put you in one of these rectangles. We can unpack it together. And maybe you can set me right on whether AI has ego or not. I loved your description of self-correction versus self-learning.

I think everyone should revisit that and think about that because it's, I think it might dictate what happens next. All right. Well, speaking of what happens next, Mark is going to go make some more mince meat pies. I'm probably going to go run out on a lacrosse field with a team or two. So you guys have great holiday coming up. We will see you at the top of the year.

Merry Christmas.