“One of the things we know about history is that we should never underestimate human stupidity it’s one of the most powerful forces in history… when you give good people bad information they make bad decisions.” — Yuval Noah Hariri
Google has announced plans to extend its election related restrictions to most of its artificial intelligence products the tech giant said through election day its AI features will not show responses for a range of election related topics including questions about candidates voting processes and election results our next guest writes about the future of democracy in the age of artificial intelligence New York Times best-selling author youal Noah Harari joins us now with his new book titled Nexus a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI you’ve all it’s great to have you with us we don’t quite have time to go from the Stone Age all the way to AI but I know you’ll be back tomorrow so maybe we can get through it in in our two days um but let’s today focus on the impact of AI on our politics yeah which we’re seeing already and have seen now in the last couple of election Cycles as you study it and you look at it what is the impact the potential impact AI could have on the way the country votes this fall well what should be clear to everybody is that we have the most in the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to talk with each other something is obviously wrong and you know there are many explanations that are unique to the us about what’s happening in the American society American politics but you see exactly the same thing in my home country in Israel you see exactly the same thing in Brazil in France in the Philippines all over the world the Democratic conversation is falling apart and democracy is a conversation and the fault is with technology because democracy is really built on top of Information Technology for most of human history large scale democracy was impossible because large scale realtime conversation was impossible the only examples we have of ancient democracies are city states like Athens or even smaller tribes you don’t have any example of a large country millions of people over thousands of kilometers who function democratically before the rise of modern Information Technology newspapers then radio then television so information technology is not something you have on the side of democracy it’s the the the infrastructure it’s the basis and any major upheaval in information technology is bound to create a a political earthquake which is not which is what we are experiencing and we have this sort of world don’t we of Choose Your Own Adventure which is if you can hear the story you want to hear based on your political ideology or your your um you know your fty to a certain political candidate but how does AI play into that we talk so much about our silos that the version of truth and the facts that we present here on our show every day can be 180° from some of the lies you might hear other places how does AI factor into that it amplifies it uh because it can now start create content by itself uh previously we saw that algorithms uh battle for human attention by presenting us with certain content but they couldn’t create the content by themselves all the content was created by human beings now ai is the first technology in history that can actually make decisions by itself and create new ideas by itself it can create texts and images and videos and so forth and we are just seeing the beginning of this new wave uh and the other thing that AI is capable of doing which no previous technology could was create intimate relationships with human beings hold conversations with them if you think about democracy is as as a group of people standing in a circle and conversing talking with each other now now imagine that a group of robots are joining the conversation and speak very eloquently speak very emotionally and you can’t tell the difference you don’t know who in the circle is a human being and who is a robot now here when we are together in the flesh around this table we can still know it but when you see something on the screen it’s you can no longer be sure whether this is a real human being or whe whether this is generated by AI of course we are not helpless in the face of it AI is not necessarily going to destroy democracy uh it can also strengthen democracy it depends on the decisions we make like one obvious decision is to ban fake humans you know previously in history we banned fake money because it was possible to counterfeit money nobody ever ever bothered to ban fake people because there was just no technology to create fake people now we have the technology to create fake people so politicians should ban this you’ve also AI poses a huge problem to the survival of democratic institutions what though are the unintended consequences of this technology being Unleashed within authoritarian States oh they’re also afraid of it you know the most scary thing for a dictator is a subordinate that is more powerful than you and that you don’t know how to control and this is AI and if you think for instance about uh online censorship so dictatorships work by terrorizing people if you go on on on on Russian internet and say something bad about Putin they will come after you they will send you to the gulag now what do you do with a dissenting bot with a dissenting AI that starts saying things against Putin you can’t say send this AI to a gulag you can’t foren its family they for a regime based on terror it’s very difficult when you suddenly have millions of new independent agents that are impossible to terrorize and which are unpredictable the other main problem of dictators is that they are always uh you know the the target for manipulation in a democratic country to take over the country it’s very difficult because you have to deal with so many conflicting organization institutions whatever a dictatorship is a centralized information system you basically need to manipulate one person to control the country and it’s been done many times in history with humans for an AI to manipulate a single dictator it’s much much easier than to manipulate a democratic structure you basically need to figure out this one extreme paranoid individual how to press their emotional buttons and you have control of the country you just said something a few minutes ago that to my ear makes AI sound more dangerous than dynamite and what you said was that uh you could ban human fake humans on AI we can’t ban assault weapons in this country how do we get to ban fake humans through AI how does that happen that’s a political problem I don’t know I’m not a politician but there should be here again a a an a I don’t see why Republicans Or democrats would like the idea of fake humans this is not good for every for anybody we have our differences but when it comes to humans versus the robots everybody should be on the same side uh whether it’s it’s possible or not I’m I’m I’m not sure again one of the things we know about history is that we should never underestimate human stupidity it’s one of the most powerful forces in history really the the key question that I start the book with is if we are so smart why are we so stupid like we are such a smart species we can get to the moon we can split atoms and whatever and yet we are on the verge of destroying ourselves instead we have a menu of self-destruction previously it was just nuclear nuclear War now we also have ecological collapse now we also have the rise of AI we know these things endanger us we know we can’t control them and yet we produce them so it raises a big question mark about the human species but I think the good news is that the problem is not in our nature the problem isn’t human nature the problem is our information when you give good people and most people are good people but when you give good people bad information they make bad decisions