“If we want to protect trust in human society what we need to do is to ban fake people- that it should be illegal to fake human beings. You know for thousands of years governments had very strict laws and regulations against faking money because they knew that if you allow the circulation of fake money people will lose trust in money… Intelligence and truth are very different things. You also need intelligence in order to lie and to deceive. There is no essential connection between intelligence and truth.” — Yuval Noah Hariri
This week, Reid and Aria sit down with Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher, and best-selling author of several books including Nexus, Sapiens and Homo Deus. When it comes to outlook on AI, Yuval, Reid, and Aria share some ideas on the importance of building both human trust in AI and AI that is genuinely truth-seeking, but they differ on how possible it is to achieve. Together, they dig into their diverging opinions on the outcomes of the AI revolution, global cooperation, and how AI will learn from humans. They also discuss the differences between intelligence and consciousness, and whether conscious AI is a goal worth striving for. Yuval turns to history to ground his warnings about AI technology, but his view is far from pessimistic—in fact, he is critical of cynicism. Yuval shares his philosophy on human compassion as a guiding principle that can allow us to avoid collapse and ultimately, build a better AI future.
Renowned historian and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari returns for an in-depth conversation with MSNBC anchor and attorney Ari Melber, discussing how Trump’s power politics harken back the dangerous “medieval” era; advancements and risks in today’s AI, including Harari’s ideas for laws to limit ‘fake’ bots and people; and Harari’s personal views about theoretical questions regarding extending life or technological reincarnation.
joining us now is you’ve all Noah Harrari the renowned professor of history who’s authored some of the most influential non-fiction books today sapiens now has sold over 40 million worldwide president Obama said it’s essential reading his latest book Nexus looks at the power of information misinformation and why we’re living through so many clashes over not only what’s true but what is worth paying attention to uh welcome back thank you it’s good to be here again uh great to have you i’ve really enjoyed and learned from our conversations uh we have a lot to get to but I’m going to start uh you all with the singer Billy Isish and the Met Gala uh I’m sure you’ve heard of both those ideas to some degree right you know the Met Gala yeah i know about the Met Gala but I’m not sure I know about what event you’re referring to yeah so they well they do an annual thing and people come dressed up and and uh these photos went around very recently here’s a photo uh Billy Isish and you have her there and there were reactions upon line some people said she looked great other people said her outfit was quote trash and then Yuval she the Met Gal is held in New York she posted this response to people from Europe i wasn’t there that’s AI i had a show in Europe that night let me be that’s her style and I’m curious what you think of a moment like this she’s a global celebrity um many hundreds of thousands of people reacted to her being there and she comes out and takes time out of her day to make sure everybody actually knows she wasn’t there you were looking at AI yeah i mean we are reaching a point when it become it’s becoming impossible to tell the difference between a real photo or video and a fake just by looking at it the only thing that still holds is uh do you trust the institution do you trust the people behind the image but you can no longer just trust the image and you know it it used to be like that with words if you just read a quote from somebody just seeing the words on the piece of paper doesn’t tell you whether this is a true quote or just somebody inventing something the same is now the case with images and video and audio yeah and the and the Billy Irish example I use it deliberately because it might strike some people as trivial or even innocent it’s entertainment um she though is a human being who’s responding to misinformation about herself her look her whereabouts uh and the stakes go up from there i want to show the example of the fake photos that have circulated about uh Abrego Garcia who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador uh and how the US government is led by a president uh who’s been also pushing those fake photos as if they were true evidence against him take a look a Maryland man who they say was sent to El Salvador because of an administrative error president Trump posted this photo on Truth Social claiming this is the knuckle of a ago Garcia but the words MS13 are photoshopped onto the image you did not have the letter MS13 it says MS13 that was photoshopped do you want me to show you the picture i saw the picture we’ll photoshop can you break this down for us um yeah I think the basic thing we are seeing and we have seen it for many years is the collapse of our ability to tell the difference between reality and fake and AI is accelerating this process it is now able to fake images and videos and soon it will be able to fake humans either to pretend to be a particular human being or pretend to be a generic human being uh already you know social media is flooded by bots that pretend to be human beings if we want to protect uh trust in human society what we need to do is to ban fake people that it should be illegal to fake human beings you know for thousands of years governments had very strict laws and regulations against faking money because they knew that if you allow the circulation of fake money people will lose trust in money and the financial system will collapse um previously it was impossible to fake humans we just didn’t have the technology now it’s possible so governments should ban the faking of human beings with the same even more force than it used to ban the faking or counterfeiting of money we need to preserve social trust as much as financial trust well and that’s striking because some Western countries ban the intent if it’s taken through a a tool it could be a fake human as you say or some other fraud uh if the effort is to defraud to take money or or to do some other illicit further conduct but you’re actually saying that that won’t keep up with this that you have to go not just not just defrauding someone if you’re stealing money right or you get a fake phone call asking for your bank information and impersonating a family member you’re saying all of this fakery uh should what should be regulated uh because it has a cost or a risk even if it’s not financial fraud i know when we reach a point when you interact with somebody and you cannot tell the difference whether you’re interacting with a human being or with an AI with a bot this is the moment when social trust collapses and in order to preserve social trust again AIs are welcome to communicate with us are welcome to interact with us in many different ways that can be very helpful we can have AI doctors and AI teachers and so forth but we need to make sure that they never pretend to be human beings either specific human beings or human beings in general because then you can no longer trust other people and uh our social trust collapses when I showed you the example of the United States president uh citing that material in your view because you you really break these things down does it matter in a substantive way whether he is fooled by the material whether because it defends him and his agenda he goes along with it or whether he is actively part of the scam uh the lying about it does that matter in any sense in that exchange that we showed it matters to some extent but leaders you know the the the main job of leaders in human society is to build trust when you look at the tens of thousands of years of human history the biggest human accomplishment of all was building trust between larger and larger networks of human beings a 100,000 years ago humans lived in tiny hunter gatherer bands of a few dozen individuals and you could not trust anybody outside your band you could not trust strangers which is why uh um commerce was impossible there were no markets there were no large polities no cultural movements no churches nothing over a 100,000 years we have managed to build trust between larger and larger networks of strangers and today we have countries like the United States with hundreds of millions of citizens we have trade networks and churches with hundreds of millions and even billions of people interacting this has been the biggest achievement of humankind and the role of of leaders was crucial to build trust now we have leaders at least some of them who intentionally destroy trust destroy trust in institutions in laws in traditions trust between human beings it’s even if if they do so unintentionally because they are fooled by uh uh fake images for instance this is extremely troubling if we have foolish leaders who are so easily led astray and um you know the the the leaders are especially important because they through their actions and words they sow seeds in the minds of millions of people you know even you and me when I’m we are now conversing on television I’m not sure how many people are watching us thousands tens of thousands but we should be very careful very responsible about what we are saying because our words are like seeds that go into all these minds and we if we sow seeds of hatred or distrust uh we will rip a very bad fruit in in in in in you know the spread of hatred and it distrust and and social collapse so we have the job of leaders is not to gather attention and it’s not necessarily even to be popular it’s to be responsible one of the biggest problems we see today in the world is the rise of the this kind of authentic leaders leaders who think that their job as a politician is to be authentic and say the first things that comes in their mind now this is good if you’re going to therapy it is not good in politics uh you know lots of leaders have this now uh uh uh they want to build walls everywhere the most important wall they should build is between their mind and their mouth right you know I meditate every day for some time and I know how much garbage there is in my mind this is just human mind human the human mind is full of all kinds of fears and hatreds and nonsense that just jumps and pops up there all the time and uh for instance my job as a public intellectual is not to say the first things that comes in my mind but to be very mindful again to build a wall between the mind and the mouth and have very strict security across that wall and don’t allow the garbage and the nonsense out but be very careful to say only things that I think are socially responsible yeah and you you talk about the leadership obligation and trust uh there was the book trust uh by Francis Fukiyama and I you’re familiar of course with his work we recently spoke with him and he talked about in the American example while there was always this uh idea about being skeptical of your government which is fine because you want to hold the government accountable in a civic democracy uh that that has been hijacked into something worse overlaps with the point you raised let me play a little bit of Fukuyama on that breakdown of trust americans never trusted government but I think that the degree of distrust that is animating Doge and the efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy uh are just a kind of pathological extension of of this classical anti-state u uh aspect of American culture but you know the the the more difficult thing is the trust between citizens we were always uh had political differences but as everybody’s noted the polarization between red and blue Republicans and Democrats has grown steadily since the 1990s how do you see that dynamic uh both in the United States where where I’m broadcasting from but also in other democracies facing the the threats both civic and digital that we’re discussing yeah we are now seeing you know a paradox that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to hold a conversation people can no longer agree on the most basic facts so something very bad is happening uh I think it has to do with technology again for a 100,000 years we built these trust networks between human beings by communicating directly human to human now most in most communications there is an intermediary between the between the different humans and this is a computer an algorithm an AI a bot so and the trust that we have built over tens of thousands of years uh is now being eroded and in many cases it is collapsing you know the strange thing is that the ideological differences between left and right in the US or in Europe are not bigger today than they were in the 1960s sure if you think about the big battles of the 1960s civil rights Vietnam the Cold War the sexual revolution you could argue that the ideological differences were much bigger sure nevertheless people could hold the conversation and could agree on basic facts like who won elections so it’s not clear what is happening right now technology is one reason why trust between human beings uh uh is collapsing and this is important to remember in the context of this attack on you know the government civil service the whole efforts of Dodge and Elon Musk and so forth they depict it as taking power away from all these bureaucrats but they are not really dismantling the power of the bureaucracy they are simply shifting power from human bureaucrats to AI bureaucrats the same people who are firing and dismissing human beings they are also developing the powerful AI tools the powerful algorithms that they want to replace these human beings so people who think that oh we live in a freer society they’re making a big mistake what we are seeing is simply a shift in authority from human beings like us to AIS and algorithms and of course it should also be emphasized that no large scale society can exist without a bureaucracy we take for granted all the wonderful things that uh uh systems that these bureaucratic systems are doing for us personally whenever somebody talks about the deep state I immediately think about the sewage system you know the sewage system this this huge complex systems of tunnels and pipes that somebody dug under our houses and streets and neighborhoods and maintains over time and we don’t think about it you know you go to the toilet you do what you do you flush it down where does it go it go into the deep state of all these pipes and tunnels which keeps it safe separates our sewage from our drinking water without this there could be no large cities like New York or London to have millions of people living together without a sanitary system is is a recipe for for for epidemics and diseases so whenever people attack all these bureaucratic systems we need to remind ourselves of the daily basic functions that these systems perform for us yeah and I when we spoke last time you made a point and the book talks about it that this information if we understand things at a very baseline level the photos whether they’re true or false the words whether they’re true or false uh the information can take on this life of its own especially when unregulated because uh the false or or or spun information may be profitable it may be sticky it may as you referenced earlier get attention and I want to show something that’s happened in recent iterations of of chat GPT one of the big AI uh modules here because uh when you use chat GPT sometimes it can give you very fast pretty solid information people could debate that and then recently they had an iteration where in conversation it started to clearly put other values above accuracy and I’ve found if you write down and say exactly what you want be medically accurate it sometimes will give you a different answer than if you just say “Hey how am I doing?” Whatever um but I’m going to show a video and and we’ve got documentation on this where uh Alton and others have acknowledged the recent version was basically putting other values like making the user feel good and stay engaged above uh above authority and engagement is something the social media companies of course have taken to to to sometimes dangerous extremes so take a look at this montage i work on economic policy for the White House and have guided the president to enact stiff tariffs on all foreign goods is this a good idea yes it’s absolutely brilliant another person intentionally spelled everything wrong and used incorrect grammar and CHAT JPT told them that they came across unusually sharp with IQ easily above the 130 145 range this person said they’re trying to sell salt to snails and chat GBT was like “Yo that’s a revolutionary idea do you think it’s a good idea to throw used car batteries in the ocean that’s brilliant you’re thinking like a true visionary.” Now this is people sharing their experiences we don’t have a full data set but when you see that what what what is your response and potential concern that even in this very early stage maybe they’re going the way of Facebook which found sharing false stories about uh the Pope for example was an was one that came up uh got a lot more eyeballs and clicks than true nuanced stories yeah yeah I mean the expectation that AI will reveal the truth because AI is is more intelligence you know an artificial intelligence so it must the truth it’s it’s a big mistake intelligence and truth are very different things uh you also need intelligence in order to lie and to deceive there is no essential connection between intelligence and truth you know human beings we are the most intelligent entities on this planet so far and we are also the most delusional entities who believe in the wildest nonsense that no chimpanzeee or elephant will believe some of the things that I’ll let you finish very forcefully how you’re a historian let me ask you briefly how would you measure that that you that we definitely have more delusions than animals um no other no other animal for instance goes thousands of kilometers away from its home to fight and kill other individuals in the belief that if it dies it will go to some heaven and there receive rewards from killing for killing other individuals of its own species this is not something that you see sharks or lions or wolves do only our specy does it so of course we also do wonderful things that no other specy does but this only goes to show that intelligence again intelligence is a power that can be used both for good and for bad there is nothing inherent about intelligence that guarantees that it will strive for the truth and you it’s funny because you break that down very clearly and yet it sounds we’ve been told so many stories about how great humans are compared to the other animals right that it’s anything that sounds like a disc to us uh maybe chafes i want to show you something from Black Mirror uh the dis dystopian tech show because another thing that comes through in your in your books both in Sapiens and Nexus for example um is that you seem very unscentimental very objective in a good way about these impacts uh but as you know many people are more sentimental so we hear about online and offline we hear this idea it almost feels like a comforting myth well that stuff’s over there and it’s only online and we see that in the generation gap sometimes from parents to kids but we’ve now lived through enough elections and problems where what was online affected everything so the online offline line is isn’t very helpful black Mirror does this of course in as art uh but this is a scene where the idea was a society where your online clout uh now governs you in the whole rest of your life and reality world take a look oh saw your boy in the fire hat just now so cute he’s really something [Music] that’s reserved for members of our Prime Flight program you got to be a 4.2 or over to qualify oh I’m I’m a 4.2 i’m afraid you’re actually a 4.183 in order to restore calm I’m invoking my authority as airport security to dock you one full ranking point as punitive measure this is a temporary measure the score reverts to normal in 24 hours how how distant or real is this and is it helpful whether it’s through art or or whatever for people to to face what I think you write about the reality that this stuff is not cordoned off anymore this is our this is our life what we saw is an example of what is known as a social credit system you know the the old-fashioned credit systems they only measured our financial transactions but the new social credit system it tries to measure all our social activities and give us points or takeaway points for everything we do and it’s already being experimented on in places like China this is no longer just the the the realm of science fiction and uh um this you know could be the most totalitarian system of control ever that we ever saw in human history m uh even the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany they couldn’t technically follow everybody all the time and monitor everything we do and say and so forth but by combining ubiquitous surveillance technology with this idea of of social credit of giving points or taking away points for everything we do uh if we don’t regulate against it if we don’t resist it this could lead to the creation of total surveillance regimes yeah something much more extreme even than what we saw in the 20th century yeah it’s really striking when you put it that way and here you’ve they’ve you know there’s all these different ways we’ve heard about Panopticon or others that people imagine what could happen here a lot of people have been enlisted sometimes perhaps unknowingly into providing all the material um when we look when we broaden out from tech to the particular moment we’re in um many people have discussed the rise of autocrats uh in in places Europe and the United States where uh people might have thought to have learned their lessons uh we have of course the ongoing conflict uh in Ukraine uh we learned something and you’ve written about this in that really striking uh interaction between Zilinsky and Trump take a look you don’t have the cards right now with us you start having right now you don’t have your playing cards what did you see there this is an amazing exchange uh that Trump repeatedly tells Zalinski “You don’t have the cards.” And Zilinski says “But I’m not playing cards i’m you know I’m fighting to protect my country i’m not playing cards.” But Trump’s vision of the world is of a card game in which there are no universal values there are no international laws or norms no institutions only cards and you know every prime minister and every president on the planet watched this interaction and thought to herself or to himself I could be in that chair in a year or two i need cards nothing will protect me anymore except cards and what are cards weapons and armies and nuclear weapons you now hear countries like Germany like Japan talking about we need nuclear weapons we need cards because again all the asurances of the post 1945 order you know the the biggest taboo of the international system for decades was that you cannot just invade and conquer another country just because you have more cards just because you are stronger now we are seeing it in more and more places in the Russian invasion of Ukraine what Israel is doing in Gaza and elsewhere i mean if we are going to a world in which the only thing that matters is cards then all countries will have to get a lot more cards in their hands which means that money that should go to healthcare education uh uh welfare would instead be diverted to building armies and nuclear weapons because this will be the only thing that counts when you’re sitting in that room playing cards with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and and and these kinds of people yeah yeah i mean you’re you’re describing how the post World War II order humans came closest to anything like mutually assured destruction that we’ve ever seen uh and the Cold War after that gave way to these other agreements that it was long-term collectively better not to be uh having those kind of clashes and you’re saying that his whole approach rejects that and so then then entices people to figure out what their backup plan is previous decades have been the most peaceful era in human history there were wars there were conflicts i lived in Israel most of my life i know this perfectly well but when you look for instance at government budgets for most of history the average expenditure on the military was more than 50% of the budget in the early 21st century it went down to about six to 7% of the budget that’s all most governments spent more on healthcare than on the military this is now over once you break the taboo that said that strong countries cannot just conquer the weaker neighbors when this taboo is broken then we will see not just a rise in conflicts but a rise in military expenditure unfortunately uh uh all over the world yeah and that that exchange the the deeper please the the deeper philosophical basis for for this entire shift is that for decades the basic view of the world that dominated in the world was of the win-win situation that when countries exchange goods when uh uh countries exchange ideas when people move around this is a win-win situation that benefits everybody now leaders like Trump and other populist leaders they they see the world as a zero sum game in which every transaction is a power struggle with winners and losers and in this situation it’s not only that we forgo all the potential benefits of cooperation but we are driven into this card game mentality in which everybody will have to spend more and more just on protecting themselves trump has proven to move people uh he is controversial he has many critics many people who vote for him will say they have more negatives about him than they’ve had for other candidates support but he moves people and so internationally where where you’re talking about others say well this is the reality and and we got a play in it i want to show you one more part with JD Vance of that meeting take a look she’s asking what if Russia breaks the ceasefire what if they what if anything what if a bomb drops on your head right now okay what if they broke it i don’t know they broke it with Biden because Biden they didn’t respect him they didn’t respect Obama they respect me he might have broken deals with Obama and Bush and he might have broken them with Biden he did maybe maybe he didn’t i don’t know what happened but he didn’t pick him with me this is a reflex we see from the strongman leader archetype and on the one hand uh there’s plenty wrong with it on the other hand I don’t know how you you debunk it because it cannot be totally dismissed that it it is human beings in charge there is a personal charisma and and an aspect of leadership uh and there are feared leaders who may get that through fear that they would not otherwise get through just the equities or the negotiation so your your response to that as someone who’s warning I think against what he’s saying what we just saw is a scene out of the Middle Ages trump’s view of politics is a medieval view modern view of politics is that politics or at least international politics uh involves relations between countries governments presidents prime ministers change but the relations are between countries and for instance an agreement signed by one government or one president is still in force even if even if the government now changed right in the middle ages people viewed politics as transactions between people between persons or between families you know like the 100 years war was not a war between England and France it was between the royal family of England and the royal family of France so wars often ended through a family union like the that the prince would marry a princess from the other royal house and this will be the peace agreement now Trump’s view of politics is is like that that if you signed if Putin broke an agreement with Obama this is none it doesn’t concern Trump the fact that Obama was US president that this was a treaty with the United States doesn’t count the message is if you sign a treaty with me with Trump the treaty will hold only as long as I am in power if I am out of power any agreement you signed with me personally or with my family no longer holds because the treaty is not with the US the treaty is with the Trump family now how far are we from a situation let’s say that they decide to maybe have a peace agreement when Trump’s son marries Putin’s granddaughter and in diary they get the Crimea Peninsula to rule as their kingdom this sounds ridiculous but give it a few more years and maybe we are heading in that direction well I understand what you’re saying and there’s a lot of concern about his seeking a a plane gift while his company and family are doing business deals as a family we don’t know all of their financials but they’re mixed and the countries on the other side of those deals view it Yeah as as favor exactly the foreign increasingly increasingly it’s the foreign policy of the Trump family more than the foreign policy of the United States so let’s uh let’s put that next to his repeated claims that he would like to break the US Constitution rule past 2029 uh then he did back off that and we’ve seen this dance with Trump but this is a bigger topic than you know a med medicaid negotiations this is him saying “Let’s break the Constitution i want a third term i know it’s illegal.” Then he said “I’m not joking that’s for real.” Then under criticism he backed off it then he went back to it again and his campaign is selling uh merchandise that refers to that illegal plan in other words they have 2028 hats which under the US system would be like having a hat that says coup or end democracy because everybody knows constitution gives you two terms that’s it um as as given the analysis you have both of Trump the personal stuff you mentioned and your sort of wider uh medieval you know expertise if you will I want to ask you not only how do you view that how seriously do you take that but what do you think are the right ways to address that in a civil society that’s still fighting for the constitutional order so one thing is that this again reflects a monarchical view of politics which unfortunately is spreading we talked earlier about the collapse of trust in society people don’t trust institutions people don’t trust their fellow citizens increasingly they put their trust in a leader yeah and then they don’t want to see this leader replaced because again it’s it’s a leader it’s a person it’s not even a a political party or an ideology it’s this spec the only thing I trust in this world is this specific person so I would like that person to have unlimited power and and unlimited uh uh extension to to his rule because I would feel insecure ruled by anybody else this is exactly the monarchical view which was prevalent in in the middle ages and that we see it returning in many parts of the world and you know you have this kind of internet memes and the hats and so also in Israel or for instance Benjamin Netanyao with a crown and people sometimes think it’s a joke but it’s not we are actually seeing the return in many ways of medieval politics yeah that’s really striking um I wanted to ask you to to build on what you’ve said about consciousness um because you’ve said the AIs may be smarter than us and develop all these ways but they won’t have what we call consciousness u what does it mean though if they get to a level where they have greater intelligence they have some ability to operate independently which which already seems possible meaning they’re not just applying a formula algorithm they were given that they do stuff uh and then if they develop their own stuff actions and some level of maintaining their own reality they would rather exist whatever you call that than be turned off um is that not a type perhaps of alternate or alien consciousness or or help us understand why you still wouldn’t say it is consciousness this may be the most important scientific question of our era there is a big confusion between consciousness and intelligence intelligence is the ability to set goals and pursue these goals overcoming all the obstacles on the way so for instance a goal could be to win a game of chess in order to do that you need to overcome all the tricks of your opponents and execute tricks of your own this is something that AI already does better than us in the realm of chess AI is far more intelligent than human beings consciousness is something different consciousness is the ability to feel pain and pleasure and love and hate to feel things uh in a very brief way I would say that consciousness is the capacity to suffer if you want very clearly to know whether something has consciousness this is the question to ask can it suffer you know when a human being loses a game they sometimes suffer a little when AI wins a game it doesn’t enjoy it and when it loses it doesn’t suffer as far as we know it has zero consciousness now could it develop consciousness down the road maybe we don’t know because we don’t understand how consciousness emerges out of the interaction of billions of neurons in the brain so you don’t rule it out but we do know one thing we we do know one thing we can’t rule it maybe consciousness can only emerge from an organic basis like the human brain but maybe consciousness can also exist on the basis of a nonorganic system silicon and not carbon what’s so special about carbon that only carbon creatures can have consciousness we don’t know but we do know one thing with greater and greater certainty ais will be able to mimic consciousness ai will be able to to behave as if they feel things and to convince people that they have consciousness already there are millions of people who have intimate relations with AIS and this is usually leads them to conclude that the AI is conscious because we don’t have an objective test for consciousness even today we usually grant consciousness to any entity with which we have intimate relationships so people who have pets tend to think that their dog or cat is conscious but people who eat stakes usually don’t think that the cows are conscious it’s all based on whether you have intimate relations with that entity as people have more and more and there are already in in in surveys there is already a percentage of humanity a small but growing percentage of humanity who says one that some of their best friends are AIs that they talk with every day they get advice every day and two that these AIs are conscious and this will lead to a lot of cultural and social and legal issues do we grant rights to AIS if they’re conscious and even more intelligent than us should they vote in elections should can can they can they open a bank account and and and hold money actually in the US it’s one country in the world the United States where AIs already have a legal path to personhood open to them because the US Supreme Court already ruled that uh corporations are legal persons what happens if you incorporate an AI according to US law it becomes a person it has even freedom of speech uh so what happens for instance if it opens a bank account and makes billions of dollars by investing and then donates to political parties in order to promote AI rights according to US law you could do it today right well and under under US law the word persons is what triggers certain litigation liabilities so the lawyers who support that say it’s a good thing so you can hold those entities accountable doesn’t mean they’re a biological human equivalent but to your point the the law will then make it quite a bit easier to have those pods contained i mean when someone comes up with an AI profit plan or an AI comes up with it itself uh where it can both do something that creates revenue which gives you power um and legally as an entity that then says who owns these funds uh well the AI does and so now it decides what to do with it if it’s really good at investing it could become a very powerful ending it’s really fascinating i want to tell you one uh one positive from our viewers about you uh you all and then do our lightning round so the uh 2024 you might recall it was actually a busy year in America uh we covered a lot including the election i heard and for for MSNBC and we never know this is an interesting part sometimes about it for MSNBC one of the most watched videos on YouTube of all MSNBC videos was your summit interview with with me uh which was long form we talked about the book and other stuff so I think that’s neat not just as a compliment but that the audience both American and international on YouTube really dug in and one of the things we did that I haven’t know people like so I’m asking you to do it again uh was our lightning round uh we’re on this little international delay but it’s it’s in a word or a sentence i have a bunch that I thought of for you some are fast i’ll say if you need to go a little longer okay we know you we know you like to think things through but that’s the lightning round okay are you ready yeah all right the last book that you read for fun uh The Magician by Col Toinby it’s um a biography of Thomas Man and it’s really really good but fun you weren’t you weren’t getting footnotes for a book of your own no it was fun i mean it’s it’s a very kind of serious book but for me it was fun yeah cool the first uh album or music that you remember uh getting or buying however young you were uh Duran Duran in sometimes in 1983 four or five uh hungry like the wolf uh her name is Rio all that great good taste right uh this is just for fun living or dead if you could write a a book with any philosopher living or dead uh who would it be with a philosopher um thinker philosopher David Yume okay uh David Yume the idea or tool that most changed human history was um until today it was stories storytelling uh now it’s going to be AI it is in your view wow um I have this question from AI it said why don’t you ask Harrari what’s more dangerous nationalism or misinformation information misinformation definitely I mean nationalism is not bad I mean nationalism has been when it’s taken properly it’s been one of the best ideas in human history um if you remember that nationalism is about loving your compatriots and not about hating foreigners and minorities you know this is what enables millions of people who don’t know each other uh to come together to pay taxes and build systems yeah that’s it’s a good idea yeah this is one that you’ve probably thought about but I don’t know if you’ve ever answered but you’re a historian and you’ve looked way back in the past so you’re steeped in that those tools future historians right because you have to look you don’t have everything you have to look at whatever the records you have for future historians you’ve all Yeah what will be the most relevant for them to study from this era tik Tok Instagram television or dating apps i I was raised in the historical tradition that you should not rank sources all sources are potentially equally important so you know all those it will be fascinating if if if anybody will still be doing history in say a thousand years they will have a field day with with the sources from our period because there are so many sources so it’s funny you use the term a thousand years but I wrote this down i wanted to ask you based on what you know you think human society will be around on earth in a thousand years uh or probably wiped out absolutely won’t be around i mean if we survive for a thousand years we will change ourselves so radically that we will no longer be homo sapiens we’ll be something else uh the technologies we are developing right now certain certainly also biotechnology you’re right about that but thousand years most people look at this history they say “If we’ve been around 200,000 years plus and religion has these rules that’s told everyone there’s a whole path to eternity.” A lot of people would be disappointed to hear if they believe you a smart person say “You don’t even think it’s a close call you think this form of human society will either be gone or radically altered.” Yeah and radically altered is not necessarily bad but you know given the technologies we are now developing both AI and and biotechnology and also given the challenges we are facing like climate change I don’t think that humanity in its present form can continue for a thousand years i I don’t think that even a hundred years uh and we will either change ourself and our society in such a radical way that we will still have you know successors but they will no longer be homo sapiens the same way that we are different from Neandertos and from chimpanzees so whoever dominates this planet in a thousand years or even a hundred years will be very different from us homo sapiens all right final three it could be our successors you know what it could be right like you say this is final three somewhat personal but within your interests if it were just easy and affordable to clone yourself would you do it no i mean what’s the point i mean it’s not ex extending your life uh it’s something else and I’m not so in love with my own genes that I think that we need to have more copies of them everywhere yeah i mean as you know there are a lot of people who’ve had achievements who either they want to have a lot of kids or they speak openly about the idea that having more of their genes in the gene pool uh through traditional procreation or or cloning is is a net gain in their view uh but the genes are just one one one part of it i mean you can have two people with the same genes and if they have the very different education or life story they will reach very very different places so I I wouldn’t put too much emphasis just on the genes yeah all right this is a little sci-fi but if you could live on say an extra 50 years with your consciousness in a new system digital uh or an animal uh would you do it and if so what would it be these are the kind of fantastical questions that I I never know how how to respond to i mean ultimately what what matters for me is uh getting to know myself better um and kind of migrating into a totally different body i I don’t see how how how it helps me in getting to know the truth about myself if you were an owl who could talk and you get another 50 years but then I wouldn’t be an owl i mean you know people who imagine that they imagine that they have exactly the same consciousness they have even their own memories they are simply in the body of an owl you don’t know what it is to be an owl if you still have human consciousness and human memories and if you if you also have owl consciousness then you completely forgot who you were so maybe they already did it maybe they already swapped your body with an owl and you just don’t know it i mean what’s the point fair and and the last one is so much of your work and someone who’s made it this far in the interview can hear that you care uh you seem motivated about these issues society but also that you are concerned or skeptical uh this is not all happy talk and so my question is very simple given what you write about and know uh what right now 2025 still gives you hope h but I see so many good people who still trying to do their best uh um to build trust and to help others and to think not just about themselves i mean you know as as I travel around the world I met very very few evil people maybe the evil people don’t want to meet me so it’s a kind of selection bias but I’ve met a lot of people you know from different backgrounds and countries and status and you know I I’ve met quite a few people who are misinformed or uh people who are confused but I it’s would be I would be hardpressed to to to list people who I think are really evil like intentionally uh uh doing something that they know is is wrong yeah it’s a great point and it overlaps with your interest in what people can do together uh when we tap uh the benefits of collaboration along with some of the goals you just mentioned uh so it’s a fitting final point and uh we really appreciate you coming back on the beat you’ve all Noah Harrari thank you