FOR EDUCATIONAL AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING PURPOSES ONLY. NOT-FOR-PROFIT. SEE COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER.

Yuval Noah Harari On the Future of Humanity, AI, and Information | The Big Interview | WIRED

do you think you will be able to trust the super intelligent AIs that you’re developing and then they answer yes and this is almost insane because the same people who cannot trust other people for some reason they think they could trust these alien AIs so welcome to the Wired Pick interview thank you it’s good to be here and that’s I believe the main theme of the your new book Nexus yes so we would like to know how should we live with especially that AI or you know super intelligence and the society in the future the first question in the late 90s actually Zela is a one idea that that if the internet will spread you know globally and then it will bring the world peace because the information will tell the truth and uh every people could get access to the every information and maybe multi- understanding will grow and finally the human being becoming wiser however you said that such a view of information is more like naive could you explain why yes because information is not truth most information is not about representing reality in a truthful way the main function of information is to connect a lot of things together to connect people together and you sometimes can connect people with the truth but it’s often easier to do it with fiction and fantasy and so forth some of the most important texts in history you know like the Bible they connect millions of people together but not necessarily by telling them the truth in a completely free market of information most information will be fiction or fantasy or even lies because the truth is costly whereas fiction is cheap to write a truthful account of anything of history of economics of physics you need to invest time and effort and money to gather evidence to fact check it’s costly whereas fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be and finally the truth is often painful or unpleasant whereas fiction can be made as pleasant and attractive as you would like it to be so in a completely free market of information truth will be flooded overwhelmed by enormous amounts of fictions and fantasies this is what we saw with the internet that it was a completely free market of information and very quickly the expectations that the internet will just spread facts and truth and agreement between people turned out to be completely naive recently that Bill Gates and interview of the New Yorker initially he thought the digital technology will actually empower the people but finally he realized that social networkings is totally different than the previous digital technologies and he said he realized too late and he also said that the AI is also the totally different technology than the previous one and if AI is totally different than the what the technology we have previously Is there anything we could learn from the history if there is nothing equivalent to the AI and the most important thing to understand is that AI is an agent and not a tool i see previous information technologies i mean I hear many people say the AI revolution it’s like the print revolution or it’s like the invention of writing and this is a misunderstanding because all these previous information technologies they were tool in our hands if you invent a printing press you still need a human being to write all the texts and you need a human being to decide what books to print ai is fundamentally different it is an agent it can write books by itself it can decide by itself to disseminate these ideas or those ideas and it can also create entirely new ideas by itself and this is something unprecedented in history because we never had to deal with a super intelligent agent there were of course other agents in the world like animals but we were more intelligent than the animals we were especially better than the animals at connecting why do we control the planet because we can create networks of thousands and then millions and then billions of people who don’t know each other personally but can nevertheless cooperate effectively 10 chimpanzees can cooperate because among chimpanzees cooperation is based on intimate knowledge one of the other but a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate because they don’t know each other a thousand humans can cooperate even a million humans or a 100 million humans like Japan today has more than 100 million citizens most of them don’t know each other nevertheless you can cooperate with them how come that humans managed to cooperate in such large numbers because they know how to invent stories and shared stories religion is one obvious example money is probably the most successful story ever told again it’s just a story i mean you you look at a piece of paper or you look at at a coin it has no objective value it can nevertheless help people connect and cooperate because we all believe the same stories about money and this is something that gave us an advantage over chimpanzees and horses and elephants none of them can invent stories like money but AI can which again the emphasis on intelligence may not be a a very may be misleading okay the key point about AI it can invent new stories like new maybe new kinds of money and it can create networks of cooperation better than us so you mention a lot about the religion the important things is you wrote in the book that those kind of the the you know acceptance vision itself of the religion will affect about the acceptance of AI itself yes in the Japanese or Asian way of in the animism way we accept naturally more like alien intelligence living together in in the same environment or like I would say multiecies things maybe is it vulnerable to accept about what AI will tell or something but could you tell if also the advantage of the those things what would you say well I think that the basic attitude towards the AI revolution should be one of that avoids the extremes of either uh uh being terrified that AI is coming and will destroy all of us but also to avoid the extreme of being overconfident I see that oh AI it will improve medicine and will improve education it will create a good world we need a middle path of first of all simply understanding the magnitude of the change we are facing that um all the previous revolutions in history pale in comparison with this revolution because again throughout history every time we invent something so we still have human beings making all the decisions so for instance in the financial system I just recently read an article in Wired about an AI that uh created a religion and wrote a holy book of the new religion and also created or helped to spread a new cryptocurrency and it now has in theory $40 million this AI wow now what happens if AIs start to have money start to have money of their own and the ability to make decisions about how to use it if they start investing money in the stock exchange so suddenly to understand what is happening in the financial system you need to understand not just the ideas of human beings you also need to understand the ideas of AI and AI can create ideas which will be unintelligible to us uh the horses could not understand the human ideas about money i see so I can sell you a horse for money the horse doesn’t understand what is happening because the horse doesn’t understand money the same thing might happen now but we will be like the horses the horses and elephants they cannot understand the human political system or the human financial system that controls their destiny that the decisions about our lives will be made by a network of highly intelligent AIs that we simply can’t understand the AI’s trust network we can’t understand and sometimes we say those things as not singularity not only singularity but the hyper object like hyperobject means what we you can’t understand and that’s context often said in environment things you know the the nature of the the the kind of system of earth we can’t understand fully so you know human being really struggling about how to deal with adapt with those change of the climate or the you know the the big earth systems and maybe the AI is just coming up to the top list of how could we deal with how human being could do you know make being flexibility or even just deal with those hyper object or just a singularity how could we do that you know if you can’t understand fully Ideally we should be able to trust the AIS to help us deal with these hyper object or with higher complex realities which are beyond our understanding but the big paradox of the AI revolution I think is the the paradox of trust we are now in the midst of an accelerating AI race with different companies and different countries uh rushing as fast as possible to develop more and more powerful AIs now when you talk with the people who lead the AI revolution with the entrepreneurs with the business people with the heads of the governments and you ask them why are you moving so fast they almost all say that we know it’s risky we understand it’s dangerous we understand it would be wiser to move more slowly and to invest more in safety but the other company or the other country doesn’t slow down They will win the race they will develop super intelligent AI first and they will then dominate the world they will conquer the world and we cannot trust them this is why we must move as fast as possible now you ask them a second question you ask them do you think you will be able to trust the super intelligent AIs that you’re developing and then they answer yes and this is almost insane because the same people who cannot trust other people for some reason they think they could trust these alien AIs yes you know we have thousands of years of experience with human beings we have some good understanding of human psychology human politics we understand the human craving for power but we also understand how to check the pursuit of power and how to build trust between humans with AIS with super intelligent AIs we have no experience at all i see so this situation the the safest thing would be to first of all build more trust with other humans humans so it’s amazing that today we have these networks of trust in which hundreds of millions of people cooperate on a regular basis and there is no such thing as a completely free market some things can be created successfully by competition in a free market we know that but there are certain services goods essentials that cannot be maintained just by competition in a free market um justice is one example let’s say it’s a free market i sign a business contract with you and then I break the contract so we go to a judge we go to a court i bribe the judge suddenly you don’t like the free market you said “No no no no courts should not be a free market it it shouldn’t be the case that the judge rules in favor of whoever gives the judge most money in that situation you don’t like the free market so much there is always a a some kind of subscrum of trust i see which is essential for any competition negative scenarios about the democracy becoming populism or authoritarianism yes but would you think about the the positive side of you know using AI to encourage the more trust network more democracies is there like any path we could make we could use you know like those new technology to enhance a democracy absolutely i mean we’ve seen for instance that in social media there were algorithms that deliberately spread fake news and misinformation and conspiracy theories and destroyed trust between people which resulted in a crisis of democracy but the algorithms don’t have to spread fake news and conspiracy theories they did it because they were designed in a certain way the goal that was given to the algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook or YouTube or Tik Tok was to increase engagement maximize engagement this was the goal of the algorithms and the algorithms discovered by trial and error that the easiest way to maximize engagement is by spreading hate and anger and greed because these are the things that make people very very engaged when you’re angry about something you want to read more about it and you tell it to other people there is more engagement if you give the algorithms a different goal for instance increase trust or increase truthfulness then they will not spread all these fake news they can be helpful for building a good society a a good democratic society another very important thing is that democracy should be a conversation between human beings i see for that you need to know you need to trust that you’re talking with another human being increasingly on social media or generally in the on the internet you don’t know if what you’re reading is something that a human being has written and is is is spreading or is it a bot this destroys trust between humans and makes democracy much more difficult but we can have a regulation a law that bans bots and AIs from masquerading as human beings if you see some story on on on Twitter you need to know if this is being promoted by a human being or by a bot and if people say “But what about freedom of speech?” Well bots don’t have freedom of speech i mean we don’t need to I I’m very much against censoring the the expression of human beings but this doesn’t protect the expression of bots i see bots don’t have freedom of speech in that context I remember that some of the one of the big company in Japan trying to make the AI constellation you know just connecting AI and even just connect with human being and AI and it just let them to discuss something important like like a multistakeholder democracies so AI would declare they are AI of course and they have really different intelligence like alien intelligence and would you think you know in the near future human being will have a discussion with alien intelligence would make us wiser absolutely because yes AIs on the one hand can be very creative and can come up with ideas that wouldn’t occur to us m so talking with an AI can make us wiser but AI can also flood us with enormous amounts of junk and of misleading information and they can manipulate us and the thing about AIS is that you know as members of society we are stakeholders for instance the the the the sewage system mhm we need the sewage system because we have bodies we can become sick yeah if the sewage system collapses then diseases like dentry and cholera spread this is not a threat to AI for the AI it doesn’t care if the sewage system collapses it cannot become sick it cannot die doesn’t care about it we need to remember it’s not a human being it’s not even an organic being its interests its worldview are alien to us uh when you talk with with people you know like we are now talking to each other are are the fact that we are embodied beings is very very clear ultimately they also has a physical existence because AIs they don’t exist in some kind of of of mental field they exist in a network of computers and servers and and so forth so they also have physical existence but it’s not organic So what is most important things for you when you think about future h I think the two key issues one we’ve covered a lot which is the issue of trust if we can strengthen trust between humans we will also be able to manage the AI revolution the other thing is the the fear the threat i mean throughout history people lived their lives inside you can say a cultural cocoon made of poems and legends and mythologies ideologies money all of them came from the human mind now increasingly all these cultural products will come from a nonhuman intelligence and we might find ourselves entrapped inside such an alien world and lose touch with reality because AI can flood us with all these new illusions that don’t even come from the human intelligence from the human imagination so it’s very difficult for us to understand this illusion i see um thank you very much for the all the interviews it’s a really inspiring and a great message even for Japanese readership and wire Japanese readership too

FOR EDUCATIONAL AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING PURPOSES ONLY. NOT-FOR-PROFIT. SEE COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER.