The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1068: Yuval Noah Harari | Rewriting Human History in the Age of AI

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

AI is reshaping society, challenging democracy, and raising ethical concerns. Nexus author Yuval Noah Harari explains its risks and potential solutions. What We Discuss with Yuval Noah Harari: Stories and shared beliefs are fundamental to human cooperation and society, from money to religion to nations. These "fictions" enable large-scale collaboration. Populism erodes trust in institutions and promotes a cynical view that all human relations are power struggles, paving the way for authoritarian rule. AI is not just a tool but an agent that can make independent decisions, potentially surpassing human capabilities in many areas, which raises concerns about control and understanding. The rise of AI and extensive data collection enables unprecedented surveillance and control, as seen in social credit systems and automated law enforcement. We can shape the future of AI by creating living institutions to monitor its development, implementing regulations to hold companies accountable, and ensuring transparency in AI interactions. By focusing on solving the right problems and establishing trust between humans, we can work toward a more positive future with AI. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1068 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I mean, you can use an atom bomb to destroy this city or that city. It's your choice. You decide to start a war and who to bomb and whatever. An atom bomb could not invent the hydrogen bomb. But AIs can invent new weapons and ultimately even new AIs.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice. that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers,

even the occasional journalist-turned-poker-champion, war correspondent, or mafia, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, our episode starter packs are a great place to do that. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. We've got quite a variety. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or even search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show back once again is Yuval Noah Harari, this time live in

Los Angeles. He was a massive hit last time, author of Sapiens and now Nexus. Today we'll explore how stories connect us as humans and may have even enabled us to outcompete other early species of prehumans. Then we take a turn into populism and authoritarian regimes before finally landing on the topic of AI, everyone's favorite sort of trending thing now, what AI can do, what it'll be able to do in the future, as well as whether or not that is actually compatible with humanity and our values as a society or a species. I know this sounds heady, some of it is, but I find Yuval super accessible, a great speaker, a fun conversationalist. I think you'll really dig this episode as well. All right, here we go with Yuval Noah Harari. I keep hearing you talk on other

podcast and elsewhere about how stories connected early humans. So maybe we kind of start there because it's an angle that most people don't take with when you read about homo sapiens, you read about like the skull structure or shape or whatever. But what we don't hear is, hey, stories are kind of the reason why homo sapiens won whatever battles there were literally and figuratively to make it to the top. How did this begin? Because of course people who are religious will say, well, in the Bible, it says the Jews have the story of coming out of Egypt together. But that story, even still, whether it's real or not, and whether people believe it or not, what that does for the, let's say, the Jewish diaspora is kind of, are you a Sephardic Jew?

No. No? Ashkenazi. Oh, okay. I just, Harari, you just seem. Yeah, I mean, originally it was Blyberg. Oh, okay. It was a kind of hebricizing Blyberg into Harare. Oh, okay, okay. Hence my terrible guess there. Yeah, but you can meet somebody like you, and then I meet my producer Gabriel Mizrahi, and it's like, oh, well, we all have this connection. It's like, well, he is from Portugal and Spain, and my family's from, I guess, Belarus, Ukraine, what, Poland, something, something. But everybody's kind of connected with the Peruvian Jews and the Israel, you know, it's all just sort of one, but it's a story.

Yeah. We're making it up. The story connects. I mean, you all believe the same basic stories. This is what connects you. Tell me about Bitcoin as a story, because the crypto, by the way, always good for virality because the crypto bros go wild over this. But I'm curious because that's also kind of a story, right?

All money is a story. Okay. I mean, the dollar is also a story. I mean, the dollar has no objective value. It's not like food that you can eat. I mean, what can you do with dollars? I mean, you can't eat them, you can't drink them, you can't worth them, nothing. And most dollars today are not even paper.

Most dollars are just digital. They're betting computers. Like more than 90% of all money in the world is just bits in computers, not just cryptocurrencies, also dollars and euros and yen, it's all digital. The value comes from the stories that we believe. that, you know, if you have the Federal Reserve and the finance ministers and the big bankers tell you that this piece of paper or this bits of digital information in the computer, they are worth an Apple, then as long as everybody believes it, it works.

You can go to a complete stranger you never met before, give them the piece of paper or the bits of digital information in the computer, and they give you an Apple you can eat. And it's all based on everybody believing in the same story. Interestingly enough, if you think about the United States today with the political divide, maybe the last story that Democrats and Republicans still share is the dollar. Oh, that's interesting. You know, they don't agree on the facts, who won the elections and this and that, but a dollar is a dollar. And this is where cryptocurrencies, one of the interesting things about them, they might break

this last bond, holding American society together. Just imagine the situation if one side decides, oh, dollars, they are part of the deep state conspiracy, whatever, we don't believe all these institutions, we believe in some cryptocurrency, then what happens if Republicans and Democrats no longer use the same money? Oh, yeah. Well, that's a good point. And when I think about the disintegration of a society or a country, there's always a story of, and then they took a wheelbarrel full of Deutsche marks to go buy eggs because they were worth nothing. Or like, Zimbabwe, here's your $10 trillion dollar bill that you need three of them to get a loaf of bread.

Yeah. And you're right. This is when the trust in the story completely collapses. Money in many ways is perhaps the most successful story ever told. But it too, it's just a story. Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned what happens when people stop believing in this. The extreme, and I'm sure you've seen this, the extreme sort of crypto bros,

bitcoins, whatever you call it, they already don't really believe in the dollar. They have to use it because they're kind of forced to, right? okay, fine, I pay my mortgage and dollars to the stupid bank. They don't know that that's not going to be worth anything later, so fine. But they have 90% of their net worth in Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. And it's because they really don't, they're thinking, we see, it's like the red pill, right? We see that money is fake. Other people still believe in it.

So we'll play their game for a while. But when it all comes crumbling down, we're going to be the ones the Bitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin, it's also just a story. Yeah. I mean, this is why they struggle so hard to convince everybody else to believe. in it. It's like a God. If everybody believes in my God, then I'm

fine. But if people stop believing in my God, that's dangerous for me. And it's the same with my money. My money has value only if other people also believe in it. If you have a private money, it's just mine. Nobody else believe in this money. It's worthless. You can't buy

anything. So it's like this kind of, again, this religious wars, I mean, which God is real. So you have now these monetary wars, which money is real. And And what is clear is that all types of money are ultimately based on stories. Again, you can't eat bitcoins, you can't drink bitcoins. Their value is because other people also believe in the same story.

It's fascinating how these stories sort of make our entire society function, but they're kind of invisible. I mean, you're raised on them so you don't see them, right? Because you're taking a bite out of it every single day. I suppose before money, people had to walk across the, whatever, the county or whatever it was, with a bunch of sheep that they were going to do. trade for a bunch of, I don't know, chickens or something like that. This sometimes happened, but mostly, you know, people lived in small communities.

I see. And the basis for the economy was not barter. The basis for the economy was just, you know, personal relationships. Oh, really? People doing favors to each other. Like, you helped me build my hut yesterday. And today you're going somewhere and somebody needs to look after your sheep or whatever. So I'm doing you a favor.

And it's not like there is a monetary system that everything has a value. in specific points, money came along as a way of kind of putting a value on everything and shifting from these kind of an economy based on personal relationships and favors into a much broader network in which strangers that don't know each other and don't trust each other, they use money to establish trust. And this is, I think, the most important thing about money to understand is money equals trust. Yeah.

Money is a trust system, probably the most sophisticated that humans ever developed. A& can be gold, it can be paper, it can be digital bits, but it's really made of trust. You know, you think about what is actually the job of bankers and investors and all these people in the financial sector? The product they are producing is trust. They don't grow apples, they don't produce cars, but they are still extremely, really important people because they produce trust. They connect their resources of strangers. The bank takes my resources and I trust my bank and then the bank gives these resources to you for a startup

or to build a house or something. And the bank basically establishes trust between us. I used to be a finance attorney and I never really thought about what we were producing. Well, I thought about what we were producing and came up pretty dry. But it's easy to make fun of these. What does they do? Like you're having the hitchhiker guide to the galaxy, that they have this plan to leave all these financial advisor behind. But actually, without them, there is no trust.

And at least large-scale societies collapse. Going back to the people with the wheelbowers, this is what happens when trust collapses. Then everything stops functioning. Just think what would happen to society today if people no longer trusted all these monetary devices. and yeah geez everything would cease to function pretty much overnight i mean yeah yeah like you said wheelbarrel full of deutch marks you start nexus with something you called i think i'm paraphrasing here is

the naive view or naive theory of information i'd love to hear a little bit more about that because i've never actually heard this before you probably heard the naive view many times just not being called right yeah exactly i mean the idea that information is truth that the more information you have the more knowledge people will have. And if there is any problem that somebody spreads lies or somebody spread fictions, the answer is just more information. And this will resolve it.

The more information you have, people will have more knowledge, everything will be okay. And this is extremely naive. Most information isn't truth. Most information is fictions and fantasies and delusions and errors and lies and so forth. The truth is a very rare and core. costly kind of information. It's a small subset of all the information in the world, which is why

if you just flood the world with information, the truth will not float up. It will sink to the bottom. And the truth, it has three problems, the truth, when you compare it to fiction. First of all, it's very costly to produce truthful accounts of anything, you know, history or physics, whatever, because you need to do research. You need to gather evidence. You need to evaluate the evidence. Is it reliable. It takes time and effort and money. This is why your books are this thick, right? Yeah. With all the footnotes. But fiction is very cheap. You can just write or say the first things that comes up to your mind. You don't need research. You don't need fact checking. So the truth is costly. Fiction is cheap. The other thing is the truth tends to be complicated

because reality is complicated. You want to understand the truth about money, about epidemics, about world politics, very complicated. Fiction can be made as simple as you would like you to be, and people usually prefer simple stories over complicated ones. And the last problem, the third problem of truth, it is often, not always, but it is often painful, unattractive. Like, you know, you want to learn the truth about yourself, your relationships, your life.

Some things are, you like to know about yourself, but some things are painful to know how you hurt other people in your life. and the same thing all the way to nations, that every nation has skeletons, sometimes entire cemeteries in its closet, that people are not necessarily that happy to hear about. Whereas the truth is, again, occasionally painful, fiction can be made as pleasant and attractive

as you would like it to be. So in this competition, if we don't kind of help truth along, fiction is bound to win. I mean, if we don't have mechanisms for kind of supporting and promoting and promoting the truth, if you just flood the world with information, open the floodgates, let anybody say anything. We don't need any fact checkers. Social media, basically. So what you get

is a flood of fiction and fantasies and lies, and the truth sinks to the bottom. It seems like what we're experiencing a lot right now, right? Journalism is less profitable, so journalists are exiting the business, they're not able to spread their message, or it's just, hey, here's a 12-page article on this really important topic. Actually, I just saw a tweet thread with three random tweets from this other person who has a totally insane opinion. I read those, but I don't have time for this New York Times piece, and it's behind a paywall, so never mind. Yep.

Right? And it's just easier for someone to say, well, this problem is probably caused by immigrants coming across the border illegally. Well, here's all these other factors that you may not really understand because they're more involved or economic in nature or something like that. And people just go, yeah, I kind of like my version where it's just brown people are invading our country. It's a simpler thing.

I can sort of tell it to other people and they shake their head vigorously in agreement and it gets you kind of, the story prevails than a version. I think the key misunderstanding in all this debate, people say, why not democratize the information market? Why give elites control of, you know, journalism and academics?

It should be like a democracy. Everybody has the same. And what people don't understand about democracy, democracy is a system for deciding about desires, not about truth. The key question you ask in elections is not what is the truth. The question is, what do you want?

And when you ask, what do you want? I fully agree that we need to democratize this question as far as possible. The desires, the wishes of everybody should count the same. Like take, I don't know, climate change. If you ask, what should we do about it? That's a question of desire, of wishes.

and the desires of a person who, I don't know, has a PhD and won the Nobel Prize in physics are not more important than the desires of somebody who did not even finish high school. They're both human beings, their emotions, their feelings, their pain, their pleasure is equally valuable. So when we have to adopt a public policy on something, then yes, everybody should count the same. These are questions of desire. Questions of truth are completely. different. If you ask, what is the truth about climate change? Is it real or is just some fantasy or conspiracy? Chinese hoax or whatever. This is not something you can decide through elections. Because again, with desire what it is important to know many people, many times

people desire the truth to be different from what it is. To find out the truth, again, it's costly, it's difficult. This is why we train experts for many, many years, whether it's in climate science, whether it's history, whether it's journalism, you go to university. Like I went to university, I studied history. I started for 10 years, what do you do when you study history in university? You don't memorize dates and names of kings

and battles and whatever. No, for 10 years, you learn how to look for evidence and how to evaluate evidence. Like you want to know what happened in the Crusades, in the Middle Ages. What do you do? You can't go there. it happened a thousand years ago. Nobody is alive from back then, so you need to look for evidence.

You need to look for old documents in some archive in a monastery. You need archaeological evidence. Today we also use genetic evidence. So where do you find the evidence? And then how do we interpret it? And how do you know if it's reliable or not? If some old document from a thousand years ago said that the army had a million soldiers. Is this reliable? Maybe they lied. Maybe they made a mistake. Obviously, there were no army. You do find documents saying they had a million soldiers. The size of the armies was about a few thousand or a few tens of thousand. So how do you evaluate? So you learn the tricks of the trade. For instance, never believe what you read or not never, but be very suspicious of the numbers you read in chronicles, which might be inflated. It's better

to rely on payment documents. Like when you write a chronicle, you invent any figure you like. But when you need to pay the soldiers or you need to pay the logistics people who bring food to the army, then it's much more accurate because the king really wants to know if he has 7,000 soldiers he has to pay or a million soldiers. So this is what you learn for 10 years. That's interesting. And when it comes to questions of truth, the opinions of people.

people have different values, they are not all the same. Somebody who studied nuclear physics for 10 years, their views on quantum mechanics are far more valuable and weighty than my views that I've never studied quantum physics, I not know. That's a really good distinction. There was something you might know that actually you might be the only person I can ask this question to.

I remember reading something, I don't know, 20 years ago about how when the Greeks were counting, anything over a thousand or whatever is arbitrary, They just said that there's an infinite number of these. And they just stopped because it was like, we're never going to need a number larger than, it might have been 10,000. Because that was like the population of all of Greece at any given time.

Maybe it was 100,000. It was something like, some number that now were kind of like, oh, yeah, the medium-sized town I grew up in has this many people. But that was the size of all of the humans that they had ever counted anywhere. And they just said, infinite number of Persians came at this point. Yeah, people, I mean, large numbers of different. I mean, if you meet five people, it's easy to count, okay, it's five people.

But when you have the Persian army of Derses invading ancient Greece, and probably the army was maybe a couple of tens of thousands of people, but for a Greek standing on a hilltop, seeing this massive amount of people, again, like you said, larger than any, the population of any city at the time, I mean, is it 50,000, is it 500,000, is it 5 million, how do you know? Right, yeah. I mean, so they write, oh, the Persian king came with five million soldiers. And part of the job of historians is to try to get the truth by trying to find more reliable evidence than what some Greek historian wrote in the chronicle.

Right. I suppose if you're standing at the top of the hill and there's an invading army, the question is, how important is it that I get the exact number and how important is it that I get off this hill and tell people that the Persians are coming? Yeah. Yeah. How does what we just discussed here interface with populism? or the rise of populism that we're seeing now.

Because you mentioned in the book, populism sees information as a weapon. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, two things to understand about populism is, first of all, it so's distrust in all institutions. Populists tell people don't believe journalists, don't believe historians, don't believe scientists, don't believe...

These are all kind of conspiracies of elite cabals. When I interviewed you last time, that's what people said about this show. Oh, you're in on the whatever I can. can't remember. Some conspiracy. Two things. I mean, first of all, this is the highway to dictatorship, because democracy relies on trust, dictatorship relies on terror. When you saw distrust, when you destroy trust in all institutions, the only way a society can keep functioning is by becoming a dictatorship, because the dictators don't need trust. They use

terror. If you don't believe any journalist, if you don't believe any scientists, if you don't believe the people in the election committee, then no democratic institution can function, and either you have anarchy, which most people don't like, so they say, okay, let's have a strong man that will just use terror to bring back order. So people sometimes think that when they start distrusting all these institutions, they are liberating themselves. In fact, they are paving the way for a dictatorship. The other thing to say about it is that it is all based on an extremely cynical view of humanity, that the basic view of populists, which interestingly enough, is also common on the extreme left among Marxists, this is something that Karl Marx would

agree with Donald Trump. The common view is that the only reality is power, that humans are only interested in power, and that all human relations are power struggles. So whenever somebody tells you something, you need not ask, is it true or not, nobody cares about the truth. Whenever somebody tells you something, this is a power play. This is a manipulation. This is an attempt by that person to manipulate you in order to get more power, to protect their privileges, their interests. That's so cynical. And this is what you hear about journalists. That journalists are not interested in the truth. They are a conspiracy in order to advance the privileges of this elite or that elite. And scientists, they tell you, it's the same. Scientists don't care about the truth.

Historians, physicists, epidemiologists, they are just trying to protect and defend the privileges, the interest, the power of some small group. And you hear the same thing about judges, about the FBI, about the Federal Reserve. What we should understand about this, not only does it destroy, if you destroy all trust, then you get dictatorship, not liberty. The other thing is that it is, is it's simply wrong. This extremely cynical view of humans is not true. Yes, humans are interested in power, to some extent, in some situations, but this is not the only thing that we want. We are not power-crazy demons. If you look at yourself, start with yourself. If I look at myself, do I want power in life? Yes, in some situations I want. This is not the only thing. I really want to

know the truth about myself, my life, the world, and the key reason for that, is that if you don't know the truth about yourself, you can never be happy. Because you don't know what are the sources of misery in your life and you can't solve them. Like if you say, ah, the only problem I have in life I don't have enough money

and you spend 10 years getting a lot of money and you're still not happy because you did not understand that lack of money was not the only source of misery in your life. You had other issues in relationships, whatever, that you can't solve with money. Yeah. If you don't know the truth about yourself

and about humans in general, you will never be happy. So people want to know the truth. And if this is true for me, why do you think other people are different from you? Why do you think the journalists, the scientists, they are power crazy demons? I'm not. I'm religiously not in the truth.

But all these journalists and historians and whatever, they are power crazy demons. No, they are like you. Yes. Again, to some extent, all people want power, but all people also want to know the truth. In every institution, there are problems, there is corruption, because institutions are made of humans, not of angels,

but that's why good institutions have self-correcting mechanisms to identify and correct their own mistakes, their own crimes, their own corruption. And this is also why we keep a lot of different institutions that keep each other in check. If there is corruption in the courts, the journalists are supposed to expose it. If there is corruption in the newspapers, it's the business of the courts and of academics to expose it. Again, if there is corruption in the universities, so you have other institutions that can keep that in check. Is it perfect? No. But do you know of any perfect system? If you just go around distrusting everything, what you get in the end is a totalitarian dictatorship. Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking is. It sounds like

populism starts off kind of masking itself as the will of the people, but then it always ends in totalitarianism because the trust is gone. And I'm thinking about places like North Korea or Belarus, yeah, where they just have friends in Belarus and they say things like, oh yeah, we just don't have that here. But my friend went to the doctor and he said, I have this, but I really need to see another doctor so I've got to fly to, I forget where, some other country. And I said, can't you just go to another doctor in Minsk?

And he said, no, you really don't want to, you can't really look at Belarusian doctors because they only give you a few different diagnoses and this could be serious. And I just thinking, imagine going to a doctor, and it's a coin flip as to whether or not what they tell you is actually legitimate because the training is so bad and nobody trusts the medical system. In such a system, when trust collapses, then Belarus is run by a dictator. Again, the dictator doesn't need people to trust him or the institutions. It's terror that keeps society together.

The other trick of populists, I mean, the very term populist, where does it come from? So populist comes from the Latin term populace, which simply means people, the people. It starts with a very attractive idea, which is the basic democratic idea that the people are the source of all authority, the people should appoint the government, the people should rule. And this is something which is accepted by everybody in a democracy. But then the question becomes, who are the people? And what makes a person a populist is the argument that only we are the people. A populist party is a party that claims that all the people who doesn't support it are not really part of the people. And this is what you hear in extreme cases, you know, like in Nazi Germany.

So the Nazis would say anybody who doesn't support Hitler is not really a German. He's a Jew. He is a communist. He's a traitor. He's an alien. The key point of populists, which makes it them dangerous, is that they don't think about the people as a collection of people, of individuals, of persons with different views and interests and so forth. No, they think about the people as this kind of mystical unified body

which has a single will, the will of the people. Now, how do you know what is the will of the people? you don't go around asking actual human beings because then you get different answers. This person says one thing, this person says another thing. But according to the populists, no, the people have just one will. So how do you know it? You have the leader.

The leader is supposedly has some mystical connection to the people and the leader knows what the people desire. Now, if you come and say, no, but I'm part of the people and I think differently than the leader, then they tell you no. If you think differently than the leader, this proves you are not really part of the people. Right.

Yeah, this is like Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un type of North Korea stuff. Like he knows better than everybody else. And if you disagree with them, you must be an enemy of the state. Exactly. In democracy, yes, the people rules, but the people is never a unified entity. The people is millions of persons

with different interests and views, and this is why we have elections. Sometimes this party wins, sometimes that party wins. and there is never unanimity. In a real democracy, there is a plurality of opinions. There is a conversation. When you say, no, the people has just one will,

and anybody who doesn't fall in line, this means they're just not part of the people, then it's no longer a democracy. It still calls itself democracy. It still says, oh, we rule in the name of the people. But, you know, all these communist dictatorships, they call themselves popular democracies or the people's republic or...

People's Democratic, whenever they had people's democratic, you know it's like a dictatorship with no freedom whatsoever. Exactly. The more they have to really highlight and bold those words, the less free the place is. Exactly. Yeah, that's always the case, eh? Money's not just a story. You can use it to get your hands on the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of the circle of people that I know like and trust, otherwise known as a network, but everybody hates that word. I'm teaching you how to build that same circle for yourself over at six-minute networking.com. It is not cringy. This is not some sort of awkward, glad-handy type course. It takes a few minutes a day.

And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Yuval Noah Harari. It's so fascinated by this, but I want to be conscious of time here a little bit. I would love to discuss AI. Of course, a bunch of people are worried about that, thinking about that these days, Nexus devotes quite a bit of shrift to AI as well.

And you give this the idea of how AI defeated the CAPTCHA. I would love to hear about this because that was mildly terrifying, I will say. It's a kind of very small example of what AI can do. When OpenAI, they developed GPT4, it was like two years ago. They wanted to test what can this thing do. So they gave it to another company that specializes in these tests. To test, what can he do? It gave GPT4 the test of solving capture puzzles.

Captcha puzzles are these visual puzzles when you try to log on to your bank account or to some website. And the website wants to know if you're a human or a robot. So you need to, they'll have this visual image of some twisted words or numbers or something you need to identify, or if there is a cat in the image or whatever. Oh, yeah, drag the puzzle piece to where it belongs in the photo. There's that one too. All kinds of things like that.

This is a line of defense against bot attacks. So they wanted to know, can GPT4 overcome this? Now, GPT4 could not solve the CAPTCHA by itself. It doesn't have this capability. But could it perhaps manipulate a human in order to overcome it? So they didn't give it access directly to the internet, but with the help of the researchers, they connected it to TaskRabbit, website, which is a place you can hire people to do things for you online.

They sponsor this show, actually. Oh, okay. But don't let that influence what we're going to discuss. I'll deal with the fallout from this. Yeah. And so GPT4, with the help of the researchers, it hired a human to solve the capture puzzle for it, and it told the human, please, can you help me solve this capture puzzle? Then comes the interesting bit.

The human task rabbit worker became suspicious. And he asked GPD4, why do you need somebody to solve capture puzzle for you? Are you a robot? They asked the trillion-dollar question, are you a robot? And GPT4 answered, no, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment, which is why I can't solve the capture, and I need your help. And, you know, this is a very small example. but it shows us the capability of AI to manipulate humans to achieve its goals.

And when you amplify this experiment, when you think what it means, we see it already in the world changing the structures of human society. And this is not some future science fiction scenario. Democracies all over the world are currently in crisis. they are undermined because of manipulations by AI. Social media algorithms are currently the most powerful editors in the world. Democracy is a conversation, and who controls the conversation? To a large extent, it's the editors of the large media. You know, the editors of the newspapers, the televisions, and so forth.

And today the most important media outlets are social media. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all that. Now, who decides what you see on TikTok? Who decides? The algorithm. And the algorithm, like with this TaskRabbit example, they manipulate now millions and basically billions of people for their purposes. And what are their purposes? The purpose given to the social media algorithms by the companies is to maximize

user engagement. This is the business model. The more people are engaged, the more time they spend on TikTok, on Twitter, whatever, on YouTube, the more money the companies make. So they gave the algorithms the task of increase user engagement. The same way they gave GPD4 the task, solve the captures. And just as GPT4 solved the capture by manipulating a human, so also social media algorithms, they increase user engagement by manipulating billions of people around the world. They discovered the algorithms by trial and error by experimenting on millions of people

that the easiest way to capture people's attention is by spreading outrage, by pressing the fear button, the hate button, the greed button in people's minds. And this is what they began to do, already 10 years ago and more. And this has destabilized democracies all over the world. It is destroying the democratic conversation. Democracy, in essence, is a conversation. Dictatorships is dictate. One person dictates everything.

Democracy is a conversation. And now we have the most sophisticated information technology in history. And yet, the conversation is breaking down. People can't talk to each other. People can't listen. They can't hold a reasoned debate. They can't agree on any facts. Why? Because one, it's not the only reason, but the main reason is because the algorithms are

manipulating us in the same way that GPT4 manipulated the task rabbit worker. Yeah, this is, Renee DeResta was on the show. I'm sure you probably know who she is, and she was mentioning that we exist in these bespoke realities where before 20 years ago, you read this article in the New York Times, I read that article in the New York Times, maybe he read another article in the LA Times that was sort of similar but was missing some information and had some different information. So that conversation was largely similar, even if we disagreed with each other. Now, you found something on TikTok and I found something on TikTok. They said the complete opposite thing and they had totally different sources or no sources

at all. And so now I think this is exactly how this happened. And I cannot even fathom why you would disagree with that or have different information because it doesn't make any sense. So the only logical conclusion is you're either lying or making it up or you are just mainlining craziness and I have the truth because I'm not thinking, wow, I'm being fed a bunch of bullshit constantly. I need to stop it. Right. Most people don't want that, but they're being fed something where they said, I watched 100 TikToks and they all said something similar. I don't even maybe believe that you also watched 100 TikToks and they said something similar, but the complete opposite.

And we can go into this conversation about social media algorithms, but I mean, I just gave it as an example, look what immense influence very, very primitive AIs already have on human society. And it should be clear, this is very primitive AIs. The algorithms controlling TikTok and YouTube and all that, they are just the first baby step in the development of AI. AI is basically like 10 years old. And it can continue to develop for centuries, for thousands of years, for millions of years. Like the evolution of organic animals, we now have an evolutionary process of inorganic AIs. And this is just the beginning. Now, for organic animals, it took billions of years to get from, you know, amoebas and microorganisms to dinosaurs and mammals and humans.

But digital evolution is millions of times faster. So if CHEGPT and GPT4 and all these social media algorithms, they are the amoebas. Just imagine how AITRex would look like. And we are likely to encounter AITRX not in two billion years, but maybe in 20 years, because it's a completely different pace for digital evolution. And that's the big question. It's not how do we deal with social media algorithms. Again, we can have this discussion. It's important. But it's a much more important thing to realize this is just the first taste. Like you go to. You go to the, these extremely primitive AIs and look what it did. It still lied to TaskRabbit and found the way around the capture.

And they didn't train it to lie. They just didn't. Do your thing. And it did its thing. And this thing was lying and making a human do the thing that they couldn't do. That's crazy. Yeah. And the most important thing I think everybody should know about AI.

The one thing everybody should know is that AI is not a tool. It is an agent. A tool is something in your hands. A hammer is a tool. An atom bomb is a tool. I mean, you can use an atom bomb to do. destroy this city or that city, it's your choice. You decide to start a war and who to bomb and whatever. Yeah, it doesn't walk over there and decide to detonate itself. Exactly. AI can do that.

AI can make decisions by itself. We already have autonomous weapon systems making decisions by themselves. And AI can even invent new weapons. An atom bomb could not invent the hydrogen bomb. But AIs can invent new weapons and ultimately even new AIs. Of course, there is enormous positive potential. Otherwise, we wouldn't develop it. AI can invent new medicines. You can have AI doctors providing billions of people around the world with much, much better healthcare than what people receive today.

I'm not saying, oh, we should stop all development of AI. No. The key question is how do we enable the positive potential of AI, to flower while avoiding the really existential risks that this technology poses. I mean, how do you even begin to answer that question? I think you said somewhere, and again paraphrasing, chatbots and AI might be the end of history. That's a little alarming coming from an historian. Yeah.

If you think what history is, history is the interaction between culture and biology. We have a biological process lasting billions of years that brought us here. History is just, you know, 50,000 years old, more or less. History is not just biology, it's also culture. History begins when people start inventing stories, mythologies, religions, political ideologies, autistic traditions. And then history is this dance between culture and biology. Like we have biological urges, we need food, but culture shapes different cuisines.

You have French cuisine and Indian cuisine. You have food taboos. Jews are not allowed to eat pork. Muslims are not allowed to drink wine. So culture interacts with biology. It's the same with sex. We have our sexual urges. This comes from biology.

And then every culture has its own sexual norms and what you are encouraged to do, what you are not allowed to do. This is the dance. This is history. Now what happens is that AI is taking over culture. More and more, the texts, the images, the videos, eventually the stories, the mythologies, the currencies, the currencies, the political ideologies will come not from human minds,

but from non-human intelligence. I see. You know, again, it's just 10 years since the beginning of the AI revolution. We already have AIs being able to produce texts more sophisticated than most humans are able to write. they're already able to produce videos, they are already able to translate from one language to another, and this is just 10 years. You know, another 10 years, and perhaps most of the cultural artifacts around us, you know, from movies to currencies, they will be produced by AI. Now, I'm not saying this is terrible, this is evil, this is bad. Let's hold a moment before we kind of rush to make judgment.

good or bad. Just stop and reflect on what it means. That after tens of thousands of years in which we lived inside human culture, we are about to enter a new era in which we live inside, to a large extent, non-human culture. One way to think about it, again, is it's like aliens coming from another planet and taking over our planet and starting to, you know, from producing better medicines and giving it. us medical advice to writing our poems and producing our movies and our political ideologies. Interesting.

And of course, AI doesn't come from another planet. It comes from this planet. We create it. But in many ways, it is an alien intelligence. I mean, the very acronym, AI, traditionally it stood for artificial intelligence. But I think it's better to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence. Again, alien, not in the sense that it's from Mars, but in the sense it means it may be make decisions, it invents ideas that are fundamentally alien to the human mind.

And maybe I'll give another famous example from the game of Go. Yes, perfect. Good transition. One of the key moments in the history of the AI revolution was in 2016, when an AI program called AlphaGo defeated the South Korean Go champion, Lisa Dole. In America, it's not big, but in East Asia, it's huge. It's a strategy game, much more complex than chess. It looks like Othello for people who know what that is.

Again, it was invented in ancient China more than 2,000 years ago and was considered the kind of cultural treasure, not just in China, also in Korea, Japan. Like if you are an educated, civilized Japanese or Chinese person today or a thousand years ago, you learn to play Goh. And for 2,000 years, tens of millions of people in East Asia played Goh. They came up with all kinds of strategies and philosophies how to play this game, which was seen as a metaphor for life, which was seen as a good preparation to be a politician, to act in the world, and people thought they knew how to play Go. And then AlphaGoa came along, and it's not just that it defeated Lisa Dole. It crashed Lisa Dole with strategies that were just totally alien.

When it first played, the human commentators who are expert goal players, they said, this is nonsense. I mean, this AI program, it makes mistakes like a little child. I mean, nobody plays Go like that. And then it turned out that it was actually a brilliant strategy. Now what we understand is that you can imagine Go as a kind of planet, as a geography, as a landscape, the planet Go, all the way you can play Go. and for more than 2,000 years, humans were stuck on one island on planet Go. They explode for 2,000 years only a small island in the landscape of all the possible ways you can play Go. And they didn't understand it.

They thought they knew the whole planet. And then, because our minds are limited, we think only in certain ways about reality. And then AlphaGo came along, and it discovered entire new continents on this planet Go, because it doesn't think like a human. It's not limited by the limitations of our brains and our evolutionary process. Now, if this is just goal, you say, well, it doesn't matter.

It's just a game. So, okay, so it knows to play go better. But what if the same thing happens in art, in politics, in finance, in religion, and it could be good, it's not necessarily bad, but before we rush to make judgment, just understand the kind of historical implications of having another superintelligence on the planet

that can make independent decisions, can invent new stuff, and can do so in ways which are really alien to the way we make decisions and invent new ideas. On the plus side, right, it might be great to have something reformulate plastic so that it is completely safe to throw into the ground and it turns into beautiful potting soil after a year, but it doesn't disintegrate when you want it outside and protect it against the rain. But what happens when crucial decisions for humanity like banking policy or something are decided by AI, but then we don't really understand how it's doing that. How can we get inside those black boxes? Do we know why AlphaGo changed, I think it was called Move 37?

Yeah. Do we know why it does that? Or do we just go, wow, that was brilliant. And why did you do that? And it goes, I don't know, I'm just really smart. Basically, I mean, it played millions of games against itself, basically, and it spotted patterns that we didn't spot. You know, the whole issue about explanations, like people now say, okay, we need a right to an explanation. Like you apply to a bank to get a loan, increasingly it's an AI deciding whether it's you a loan or not. Let's say the AI says, no, don't give this person a loan.

Right. So in some places, like the European Union, there is now regulation. that the human deserves an explanation. There is a right to an explanation. If the bank said, no, I deserve to know. Why not? What's wrong with me? Right.

And then this sounds like a good idea. The problem is that the explanation will not be this kind of one line. Okay, it's because of your ethnicity or your gender or your previous credit history. No. The way AI makes decisions, it goes over enormous amounts of data about you

and spots patterns in the data. So if the bank really wants to give you an explanation, they will send you a book with a million pages. It'll look like a copy of one of your books, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the explanation. This is, again, this is what makes it alien, that humans usually make these decisions on the basis of just one or two data points, which is why we get problems with racism and homophobia and so forth, because someone looks at you, ignores all the other data about you, just looks at your skin color and says, okay, I won't give this person alone. And this is something we can fight against.

Now, the AI doesn't work like that. It doesn't work on the basis of a single data point. It can be racist, but it's racist in a much, much more complicated way. Sure. And it goes over millions of data points about you, spots patterns in this data, and based on that makes its decision. And for us, it's very difficult to understand how it made a decision. Right.

Yeah, we can't really parse all of that when it says, well, we notice you only shave on days where you have a podcast on video, and then there's 100,000 little things like that. So we've sort of just decided that you're 1,000th of a percent too risky for us. It's like, wait a minute. And then you've got to unpack those things. Well, how does that reflect on this? We don't really know. We just know that other people who only shave three times a week, they don't pay their bills

on time. Exactly. And you have, again, there's millions of data points, and it's not the way humans make these decisions. But increasingly, this is the way that AIs make decisions. Again, it's banks, it's warfare. Like if you look now at the war in Gaza, there is a huge argument about it. We can get into this argument. But we know that AI is now being used to select the targets.

Oh, really? Yes. Like when they decide to bomb a certain building and say, oh, this is a Hamas headquarters, let's bomb it. Very, very often it's an AI that was involved, at least in the decision-making process. There is a huge argument. I don't know what the answer is. To what extent humans are still involved in the decision-making process.

I talked with a lot of people also from inside the army in the security system. They give you different versions. I'm not sure what is the truth. I'm not sure who to believe. They might not even know. But everybody agrees that we are at a stage when basically AIs can, if they are given authority, they can now call the shots, literally,

that you can now have armies bombing buildings, bombing people, based on decisions made by AI. Now, one camp says, yes, the AI goes over enormous amount of information. Based on its own calculations, it identifies a certain building as a target and tells you bomb that building, but we don't listen just to the AI, After he told us to bomb the building, we have human analysts going over all the information, making sure that this is correct before we bomb.

Yeah. That's one version. The other version says, no, no, it's not like that. They just do what the AI tells them. Oh, geez. I don't know who is right. Sure. I'm not sure to what extent humans are still in the loop.

But technically, this is everybody agrees, that technically we are already in an era when you can run a war with an AI system, decided. what to bomb and who to kill. Sure. It's now an ethical question. Do we want to do it or not? And of course, that's only a hop-skip and a jump away from. If we don't have human oversight

because we don't need it and it just delays everything, then we don't even need to have a human push the trigger. Just have the AI do it. Yeah. Time is a crucial element. Because even people who say,

you know, this is very dangerous to just give an AI the authority to bomb people. We need humans to go over all the data. But then other people say, yes, but this takes a lot of time. For an AI, it takes like two minutes. For human analysts, it can take like two days.

By the time they finish all the analysis, maybe the terrorists are gone. Right. And then you get to another stage when both sides have access to this technology. So if you have some future war, let's say between NATO and Russia, and both sides have AI weapons, and one side just gives the AI the authority, you spot a target, just shoot. And the other side said, no, no, no, no, no. we need humans to verify everything. And so you have, it's an unequal battle.

Like you have two drones. By the time the humans give the one drone, the authority to shoot, it's blown by the other drone. So just the element of time, this is really, really crucial because it's not just in warfare, it's in everything. Humans are organic and we work by cycles. And compared to AI, we are very slow. We need to rest.

We need to sleep. Day and night, winter and summer, we are organic, we live by organic cycles. AI is not organic. It doesn't live by cycles. It never needs any rest. It doesn't need to sleep. It doesn't care if it's day or night. It doesn't care if it's winter or summer.

It's always on. And in this competition, the question is, would the AI adapt to us and slow down? Or would we have to kind of ramp up and speed and speed until we collapse? And again, think about finance with which we began. Wall Street originally was a human institution, an organic institution, which take rests. Yeah, you had the guys yelling on the floor, and then when it's five, they throw everything up in the air and walk out, right? Yeah, they go home, they go to their families, they go to have a beer, they sleep. The market is open as far as I know, 9.30 in the morning to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Mondays to Fridays, that's it.

and it's also closed on Christmas and Martin Luther King Day and several other days. And this is human. Now if you give AI's control of finance, which is happening, so AI's don't need to rest and they don't have holidays. So you have 24 hours, 365 days a year cycle. And either the humans get out or if they want to stay in the game, they need to give up their private life, their sleep, their family, and eventually they collapse and die. And this is part of the dilemma we are facing that how do we make AI slow down instead of us running faster and faster until we collapse? And when I talk with the people in the industry, they are aware of the problems, but they all give the same answer. We can't slow down because the competitors won't slow down.

Like everybody will tell you, we would love to slow down. Like open AI would say we would love to slow down. But then the other companies, how can we trust them that they don't fast forward? How can we trust the Chinese? Yeah, China. And then you have this paradox that the humans can't trust each other. We are unable to solve the problem of human trust, and therefore we speed up the development of AI, but where is the guarantee we can trust the AI?

Right, yeah. I mean, you're so suspicious of the other humans, and yet, you're. You have so much trust in the AIs? You know, you have A.I. T.R.X. in 20 years and you think you can control it. You think you can trust it more than you trust the Chinese. Oh, it's our T-Rex. Don't worry. Yeah. This is what they say. We will design the T-Rex. It will be friendly. As T-Rex is often are, right? Friendly and cuddly.

Yeah. Before AI enslaves us all, take a moment to support our sponsors. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. We just take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, those who make this show possible. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. Worst case scenario, you email me. I am happy to dig up these codes for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show.

Now for the rest of my conversation with Yuval, Noah Harari. You know he's a big deal because he's got three names. What disturbs me as well is, if AI is doing something, for example, AlphaGo, and we can't really understand why. Of course we want AI to run, well, I shouldn't say of course. Of course, many people want AI to run our financial system and make it super efficient or other government. Health care, for example.

But what happens when we don't understand how our health care system works at all? Because that'll eventually happen, right? That's again, that's a danger of, you know, again, this is another version of how democracies collapse. You can still have elections, but if you can't understand most of the decisions, decisions the system is making, what is the meaning of choosing this president or that president? Again, take health care, like the choices about what treatment to give you or which treatment to give which people. If we don't understand how the AIs are making the decisions, then how do we

make sure that it's fair? Right. That there is no element of racism or bias or whatever. And in more and more areas, the problem is that we just can't understand the decisions that shape our life. And this, I think, brings me to one of the most important and neglected issues in human history, which is bureaucracy. The problems we have with AI is just a magnified version of the problem we had with bureaucracies throughout history. And the problem with bureaucracy in essence is that it's alien and boring to most humans. For millions of years of evolution, there were no bureaucratic systems anywhere. Humans lived in small bands. You knew everybody.

you understood all the decisions made in the band or in the tribe, that's it. And in those days, you know, the main stories were mythological, stories about heroes and gods and ancestral spirits. And then very, very recently in human evolution, just about 5,000 years ago, after the invention of writing and documents, bureaucracy appeared. Bureaucracies are systems of managing society with documents, with these complex systems, of forms and manuals and tax registers and so forth, they are absolutely essential for large-scale systems.

There isn't a single large-scale system that can function without bureaucracy. It's like the nerve system of this multicellular body. So whether it's, of course, an army or a country, but also a church, a university, you need bureaucrats. It doesn't function. And people find it very difficult to understand. how bureaucracies function.

Because again, they are very recent in evolution. And we don't have many stories about them. Without no... I mean, when was the last time you saw a Hollywood blockbuster about bureaucracy? In fact, the only word I associate with bureaucracy is Byzantium, Byzantine? A Byzantine bureaucracy.

Where did that come from, by the way? I know that's a non-sequitur. But where did that come from? Did they just have a complex bureaucracy? Yeah. Did they kind of invent it? They had the most complex bureaucracy at the time. Very difficult to understand.

but kept the empire going, you know, collecting taxes, paying soldiers and so forth. And again, the key thing to understand bureaucracy is not necessarily bad. I mean, we couldn't have large-scale systems, countries, cities without them. Lots of people, because you don't understand them, they have these, again, these conspiracy theories, oh, it's the deep state. When people talk with me about the deep state, I immediately think about the sewage system. The sewage system is the deep state. The literal deep state.

Yeah, it's the literal deep state. It's this system of pumps and pipes and canals and reservoirs going under our houses and neighborhoods and streets built by the governments and the municipalities. Who knows what happens there? And you know, you go to the toilet, you do your thing, you flush it down. Where does it go? It goes to the deep state. And it saves our life.

Sure. It protects us from disease. The sewage system began, or one of the places it began, is in 19th century London. For most of history, big cities were the most, the dirtiest and most disease-ridden places on the planet. You cram tens of thousands of people together with their goats and chickens and with their garbage and sewage, you get paradise for germs. And lots of epidemics. In London, in the mid-19th century, there was a cholera epidemic. And people didn't know what was causing this epidemic.

Your different theories, oh, it's enemies poisoning the wells, it's witches, it's witches, it's what? And then you had one basically bureaucrat called John Snow, not the person from Games of Thrones, but the real John Snow, which saved humanity almost like the John Snow from Games of Thrones by bureaucracy. He was trained as a doctor, and he suspected the problem was actually in the water. So what he did was he just went around London making lists. Anytime he heard about somebody who died from cholera or fell sick with cholera, he would go there and interview the family, the people, where do you get your drinking water from? Yeah, from the shit filled well right over here.

And he filled these long forms and papers in all this data. And based on that, he pinpointed a certain well in Soho as almost everybody who felt sick from cholera drank water from that well. Wow. And when they investigated, they discovered that the well was dug next to a cesspit full of sewage water. And the water from the cesspit simply sipped into the well

and people drank it and fell sick. Now, today, if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London or in Los Angeles, you have to fill in so many forms. You have to wait for permits and all this bureaucratic hassle which saves us from cholera. And this is bureaucracy.

And again, people find it difficult to understand partly because it's boring. It's very difficult to do an interesting Netflix series about the sewage system or about the budget. How does the government decide how to allocate the budget and then there are all these accountants and so forth? And this inability or difficulty to understand bureaucracy is dangerous, partly because it's fertile ground for conspiracy theories, partly because sometimes bureaucracy is dangerous. And we need to be able to tell the difference between when it acts in our favor and when there is corruption and

bias and so forth. And this is how it links to AI. AI, they will become the new bureaucrats. I mean, when people talk about the danger of AI, they often have the Hollywood scenario of the great robot rebellion. Yeah, Skynet or whatever. Skynet, the big computer trying to take over the world. That's not a danger. The danger is millions of AI bureaucrats everywhere in the banks, in the government, in the armies, making decisions about us without us knowing or being able to understand how the system works and how they make all these decisions. Now again, it's not necessarily evil. Bureaucracy can work in our favor. But if we don't understand how the system works, how do we make sure that it is benign and not malevolent? That's the big question that we

face with AI. Do you know much about China's social credit score system? Speaking of bureaucracy gone wild. I know about social credit systems in general. I'm not an expert on what specifically happened in China, especially because you don't have one social credit system there. You have dozens of different systems, experiments. They are testing different approaches to it. I know it's a pretty limited rollout where each area, like you said, it might even be like a province thing. I'm not quite sure. Some of my Chinese teachers told me a little bit about how it works. The dystopian element came when, of course, if you don't pay your bills, it's hard to book airline tickets and things like that. It's basically, I mean, social credit system is basically an expansion of money or a new

kind of money. When you think about traditional money, gold coins, dollars, even bitcoins, they give value only to specific parts of human reality. Some things you do, like you work, you gain money, you want to buy airline ticket, you pay money, but other things, you go visit your friends, you go visit your grandmother, even if you throw trash in the street, this is no monetary value. The idea of the social credit is to monetize everything, to give value to every single thing you do in life, and this is your score. So even things that traditionally were not about money, they're about reputation or status. Suddenly, you get precise points for them, and also anything you want to do, you need to use your social credit for it. So again,

it has positive potential in some regards. It could create the most totalitarian, again, systems in history where anything you do impacts your ability to get a job, to gain a loan, to travel. And in a way, you see this not only in China, you see it all over the world, also in the US, because it's a function of surveillance that traditionally only some areas of life were monitored and surveyed. And even in dictatorships, there was privacy. If you live in the Soviet Union, so the KGB can't follow you around all the time.

They just don't have enough agents. Right. They tried, but they can't. They try, but, you know, we have 200 million Soviet citizens. They don't have 200 million agents. Even if an agent follows you, what do they do at the end of the day? They write a paper report about you and send it to KGB headquarters in Moscow.

So every day, they get a... millions of reports. You need analysts to read them and analyze them. Otherwise, it's just worthless paper. So even if a KGB agent saw you do something, chances are it would just lie in KGB archive the report about you and nobody would read it. So now you can monitor everybody all the time. You don't need human agents or analysts. You have the computers, smartphones, cameras, drones, microphones everywhere, and you have the AIs. analyzing all the ocean of information. So this creates the potential for total surveillance.

And it can take the form of the social credit system. Again, anything you do, it raises or lowers your score. But it can also, you know, you also have it in the West that you did something legal but stupid in some college party 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It can come to haunt you today when you apply to some job,

you run in politics, you want to be a, judge, whatever, they will find out this email you wrote 10 years ago, this stupid joke you told 10 years ago, and then the whole of life becomes like this one long job interview. Yes, this is exactly what I'm afraid of. The note you wrote to your college girlfriend, which was a little ham-fisted breakup, is now like, you're sitting in front of a judge deciding whether or not you get to be a lawyer. And they're like, why would you write that? Yeah. I don't remember. Well, we remember.

Right. Nothing you do is forgotten. And the line between private and public is erased. I mean, the thing is that in public, we certainly need to kind of police what people say and do. There are limits to what you can do and say in public. But they are different from the limits in private. You know, if you think about politicians, for instance, I think politicians have a right to stupidity in private. Sure.

Like if you stand in front of the cameras and give a speech to millions of people, of people. Your words are like seeds that go into the minds of millions of people. If you plant seeds of hatred in millions of minds, this is very, very dangerous. And this should be restricted. But if you then, you're offline, you know, just with a couple of close friends and you say something stupid, that's your own business. Nobody should know about it. Nobody should censor you for it. Yeah, that's certainly an interesting perspective and something to consider. I guess when I think about my Chinese teacher telling me that her friend, they use an app called WeChat, which is essentially like WhatsApp or something, but much more comprehensive. She said she was talking to another friend of

hers, and there was a little badge next to his name, and she clicked on it, and said something like, this person does not pay back money that he owes to companies or people. I mean, imagine, imagine you're just like, hey, Angela, do you want to meet for lunch? Yeah, but you should bring cash, because I heard from WeChat that you don't pay your bills, pal. Like, oh, is this a misunderstanding? They were sending it to the wrong house. Well, I don't know, but all I know is your broke ass better bring some cash. That's kind of a silly example, but it's that kind of perpetual job interview. Yeah, and you know, like in Iran today, this is not science fiction.

This is actual reality in Iran. They have the hijab laws, which says that women must always cover their hair when they go out, including even in their own car. Like you take your car somewhere, you must wear the hijab in the car. Wow. Now, until recently, they had a big problem in enforcing these laws, because what do you do? You place a policeman on every street corner to make sure that all the women cover their hair and whatever, and now they have AIs.

They have these surveillance cameras all over the place, and this is daily occurrences that a woman would go in her car without a veil, without a hijab, and some surveillance camera would identify that this is a woman, she doesn't wear the hijab, identify who she is, who she is, and immediately, automatically, it doesn't go to a judge, it does, doesn't go to any policeman, nothing. Oh, wow. The AI immediately sends an order to impound the car. You broke the hijab load, stop the car.

And she gets it to her phone, and if she doesn't obey, she's in real trouble. Right. And you don't need the human policeman anymore. It's now being policed by the AIs. And people say, the same thing can happen in the U.S. with abortion. If you think that abortion is murder, like millions of Americans think, then wouldn't you use AI to stop murder? Wouldn't you build a country-wide surveillance system

that monitors if women are pregnant and suddenly are not pregnant? Oh, interesting. So it's not just a problem for the Iranian women. It can arrive here very quickly. Yeah, I had not thought of that. That would be, I mean, they would have to do that at the federal level.

I guess they wouldn't. Going inside and outside of a state, didn't you leave the state pregnant? I mean, he came back with no baby, so what'd you do over there in California? You didn't just go to Universal Studios. Yeah, I mean, that could be really scary. And the technology is there.

Yeah. Again, to do it with human agents, very, very difficult. But to do it with all these cameras and microphones and smartphones everywhere, very easy. There's also the data issue, right? Before we had the iron curtain, right? And now we kind of have, I think you've made this term the silicon curtain. Yeah, I like that. Because the question becomes, hey, does our data go to Beijing?

Does it go to Silicon Valley? Which one is worse? Aren't they both kind of bad? you have a set of rules that maybe people should listen to when they're creating these things. Not that I have any hope that they will actually listen to your suggestions, but I like them in any case. When we come to what we can do, the first thing to understand, technology is not deterministic. It's not like you create a technology. There is only one way it can go. In the 20th century, you know, we had electricity and radio and cars, and we had the Soviet Union,

and we had the United States using the same technology. So also in the 21st century, just creating AI doesn't mean there is just one future. There are choices to be made, and we had better make wise choices while we still have the power. It's impossible to regulate in advance all the different dangers and threats, because this is developing very fast. So I think we shouldn't think in terms of rigid regulations. We should think in terms of creating living institutions that are staffed by some of the best human talent and have the resources. to first of all understand what is happening, you know, that we don't have just to trust the companies or a few governments, but we have an independent, maybe international institution that can tell people all over the world what is really happening with AI. And this would be the basis for a public debate about what we should do.

But first, we need to understand. And then there are always regulations that to some extent we can agree on. Like, just to give two examples, because we don't have a lot of time. So one key regulation is that corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms. The same way that if you produce a car and the car malfunctions, this is the fault of Ford or General Motors or whatever, should be the same with technology. Again, it should be very clear. I'm not saying that companies should be liable for the actions of their users.

Like if your YouTube and some human user uploaded a conspiracy theory to YouTube, I don't think I should be very, very careful before YouTube censors humans. Very careful about that. But if the YouTube algorithm then deliberately recommends and auto plays this video to millions of people to increase human user engagement, to make more money for YouTube, this is on YouTube. I see. This is not on the user that created it. This is the decision of the algorithm, and the company should be responsible for that. So that's one regulation. The other is that we should ban counterfeit humans, fake humans.

Bots, essentially? Yes. I mean, bots that masquerade as human beings. I see. AIs are welcome to communicate with us as long as they identify as AIs. But if you talk with a doctor online and it pretends to be a human doctor, a human being, but it's actually an AI that's very, very dangerous. So, okay, let's talk with the AI.

Maybe it has good advice, but I need to know that this is an AI and not a human being. Yeah, yeah, and ideally that a human being went, yeah, that's all correct. He's not trying to kill you, right? Or that there's some liability for that person. Yeah, I can get behind that. I know we're out of time. And as an experiment, I'm going to end this interview by asking you a question that I asked chat GPT. Oh, to ask.

How do I end an interview with Yuval Noah Harare? And of course, it gave me a long explanation that I didn't really need. But the question is, if you could send a message to humanity that would be read a thousand years from now, what would it be? Yeah. Let me think about it. Yeah, go for it. Make sure you're solving the right problems. I mean, humans are very good in solving problems, but they often focus on the wrong problems.

It's been happening for thousands of years. We are solving problem after a problem, and the situation just seems to get worse because we are solving the wrong problems. I mean, I would have that, like today, the smartest people in the world working on the problem of how do you establish trust between humans before working on how do we create super AIs. And I know, if there are humans a thousand years from now, I guess we solved the, at least some of the problems facing us. Yeah. But I think it's still a good advice that before you rush to solve a problem, make sure that you are working on the right problem. I like that. If there are humans a thousand years from now, is to keep.

I mean, maybe we'll be in zoos, who knows. Maybe we already are. But thank you so much. I'm glad we finally were able to make one happen in person. Definitely have to do it again. I always make seven or eight pages of notes and I go, I hope that's enough. And then on page three, it's like, hey, I got to go, man. So that's always a sign of a good conversation. Absolutely. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. Imagine facing a rare, incurable disease and finding out that AI could repurpose an FDA-approved drug is a potential cure. That's the breakthrough achieved by Dr. David Faganbaum and the mission of his company. I'll never forget the doctor walks in the room and says, David, your liver, your kidneys,

your bone marrow, your heart and your lungs are all shutting down. That's it. We've tried everything. There's nothing more that we can do. I was terrified. I was like, had my last rights read to me. First, you know, no one thought that there was even possible that I could survive. You're dying from this horrible disease. Chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window, but it's probably going to come back. So, you know, what's your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you? Well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have within reach. I'm like, shit, I've got this horrible disease. And the only way that, like, I might be able to save myself was if I can find a drug that's already at the CVS. And so my mission then became, could I figure

out what the hell is going wrong in my immune system? So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. I'm not supposed to be here. here, like my drug wasn't made for me. It saved my life. It was always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CBS, you're nearby Walgreens that could help more diseases and more people, but the incentives aren't aligned for us to do that. So we created every cure a couple years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease it possibly can, regardless of whether it's profitable or not. 80% of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow,

no one's doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them. Tune into episode 1005 of the Jordan Harbinger Show to explore how existing medications are bringing new hope to those confronting elusive illnesses. All things Yuval, do I have to say all three names? I'm just going to say Yuval. We'll be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes,

ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter is a great companion to the show. It's called Webit Wiser. It drops every Wednesday. The idea is to give you something specific, practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships.

Again, it's like a two-minute read. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out over at jordanharbinger.com slash news. Don't forget about six-minute networking over at six-minute networking. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created, in association with Podcast 1.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogity, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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