Yuval Noah Harari: “We Are on the Verge of Destroying Ourselves”
Amanpour and Company
TRANSCRIPT (autogen)
in his new book Nexus a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI bestselling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari looks at how we got here and what we need to do next in an age where artificial intelligence poses unique challenges and he’s joining Walter isacson now thank you and you Val Noah Harari welcome back to the show thank you it’s good to be here again your bestselling book sapiens was about how we meaning our species Homo sapiens became dominant and it’s mainly about how we were able to form networks of cooperation your new book Nexus is about Communications and how they help to form those networks but it’s rather pessimistic I think you say the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely tell me about that theme well the basic question of the book of Nexus is if humans are so smart why are we so stupid we’ve named our species Homo sapiens which means Wise Wise humans and we know a lot more than any other animal on the planet we’ve reached the moon we can split the atom we can decode and write DNA and nevertheless we are on the verge of destroying ourself and much of the e EOS system um so this is the Paradox at at the center of of of the book and of course humans have been concerned with this Paradox throughout history and many mythologies and theologies they blamed human nature that there is something wrong with human nature which causes us to be self self self-destructive the book Nexus gives a different answer the problem is not with our nature it’s with our information if you give good people bad information they make bad decisions they make self-destructive decisions and we are now seeing it all around us you know we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and at the same time we are losing the ability to talk with each other to listen to each other you know there is maybe one thing that Democrats and Republicans in the United States can agree on is that the Democratic conversation is breaking down everybody accuses the the other side of course but the basic fact is that um this this ability which sustains democracy to hold a reasonable conversation it is breaking down at exactly the same moment that we have supposedly the best information technology in history you say the flaws aren’t in our nature it’s in our Communications networks yes what are the flaws in those communication networks the basic misunderstanding is about what information does what information is information isn’t truth this naive view which dominates in places like Silicon Valley that you just need to flood the world with more and more information and as a result we will have more knowledge and more wisdom this is simply not true because most information is junk the truth is a very rare and costly kind of information the basic function of information in most cases is not to reveal the truth the basic function is to connect to connect large numbers of people into networks and the easiest way to connect large numbers of people is not with the truth it with fictions and Fantasies and mass delusions and what should be done about that should governments actually step in we’re watching that happen a bit um there two things that should be done at the governmental level and there is something to be done on the individual level on the governmental level the two most obvious things to do is to ban fake humans that uh we don’t want algorithms pretending to be be humans uh and thereby distorting our information systems if you go online let’s say to Twitter and you you see that a story has a lot of traction a lot of traffic and you think oh a lot of humans are interested in this so I should also get involved but actually it’s not humans it’s Bots and algorithms this should be banned so uh we shouldn’t have the situation when algorithms that tend to be humans are running our conversations the other thing is that corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms whenever you talk about it with the big tech companies they immediately raise the flag of freedom of speech we don’t want to uh uh uh censor our users the problem is not with the human users humans produce enormous amount of content some of it hate and greed but there is also a lot of other good content the problem is that the corporate algorithms of Twitter and Facebook and Tik Tok and so forth they deliberately spread the hate and the fear and the greed because this is good for their business interests and this is what they should be liable for for the decisions and actions of their algorithms not for the what the human users are doing you’ve talked about uh humans having some misinformation and then you’ve talked about the way the algorithms work is there a difference between an organic uh information system meaning human information system and an inorganic one yes there are many differences one is that organic entities like us like human beings we work in Cycles there is day and night winter and summer sometimes we are active sometimes we need rest we need sleep the algorithms are tireless they never need to rest they are not organic and what we see in the world now is that they increasingly Force us to work according to their Pace there is never any time to rest the news Cycles is always on the mark are always on the political game is always on and if you force an organic entity to be on all the time to be always active always excited it eventually collapses and dies and you know the most misunderstood and abused word in the English language today is the word excited a lot of people mistake the word excited for happy like they meet somebody they say oh I’m so excited to meet you or like you publish a new book oh this is so exciting now excitement is not always good excitement for an organic being like a human being means that your nervous system and your brain are very engaged very active now if you keep an organic system very excited all the time it breaks down collapses and eventually dies and this is what happens now to democracy all over the world this is what is happening to to humanity we are far too excited we need time to rest we need to kind of slow down and because we give increasing control of the world to tireless nonorganic algorithms that never need to rest and can just increase the excitement all the time we are breaking down we need more modom not excitement in in politic in economics in many fields when we talk about artificial intelligence and we say how it’s going to change the way we distribute information and either Empower people or Empower uh tyrannies sometimes people reflect back on the last huge advance in information uh technology spread which was Gutenberg 500 years ago doing the movable type printing press you kind of debunk that you say artificial intelligence is is very Insidious compared to the pretty good things that come out of the printing press well there is a myth that you know Gutenberg broad print to Europe and as a result we got the Scientific Revolution and all the wonders of modern science this is a very very inaccurate misleading view of of History um almost 200 years passed from the invention of print until the flowering of the Scientific Revolution during these 200 years the main effects of print on Europe was a wave of Wars of religion and witch hunts and things like that because the big best sellers of early modern Europe were not Copernicus and Galileo galile almost nobody read them the big best sellers were religious tracks and were uh witch hunting manuals but it also was the Bible and that helped take power away from the Roman Catholic church and allow more individual religion yes it certainly broke the Monopoly of the Catholic church but again not in favor of science but in favor of more and more extreme religious sects and you got again this wave of the wars of religion in Europe culminating in the 30 Years War which was arguably the most destructive war in European history at least until the two World Wars of the 20th century uh for the same reasons that that that we see the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories and so forth right now when you make the production of information easier what you get is not necessarily facts what you get is a lot of junk information a lot of fake news and conspiracy theories and things like that if you want the truth it’s not enough to have a technology of in to produce information you need institutions costly institutions that make the effort to separate reliable information which is rare kind of information from the flood of unreliable information and in in early modern Europe it took 200 years to create such Institution like newspapers like scientific associations you know in scient scientific journals they don’t run after user engagement the the algorithms today on social media are exactly like the first wave of Publishers in the 15th and 16th century in the 16th century they also ran after user engagement we want user engagement and they discovered in the 16th century that if you produce a book by cernus with all these mathematical calculations about the movement of the planets nobody buys it it’s boring but if you publish a witch hunting manual that tells you that there is a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan and they have allies and cannibalism and and and child sacrifice and they try to take over the world and some of your neighbors in the village they are part of this conspiracy and these are a few signs how you can identify these witches in your town in your in in in your in your village and kill them these were the big bestsellers and this led to this craze of the of the witch hunts which was not a medieval phenomenon in medieval Europe witch hunting was a very rare I mean people didn’t care so much about witches in medieval Europe the witch hunts were a modern phenomenon United in part by the prince Revolution and by this flood of witch hunting manuals which were good for user engagement and very bad for everything else one of the things you say about artificial intelligence that makes it fundamentally different from every previous uh part of the information revolution is you say that artificial intelligence AI are going to be full-fledged members of our information networks possessing their own agency in other words they’re going to have their own will they’re going to decide what they want to do uh are they going to have Consciousness are they going to have planning are they going to have free will you don’t need Consciousness in and and and feelings in order to have goals and aims when a open AI developed a gp4 and they wanted to test what this new AI can do they gave it the task of solving capture puzzles it’s these puzzles you encounter online when you try to access a website and the website needs to decide whether you’re a human or a robot now uh gp4 could not solve the capture but it accessed a website task rabbit where you can hire people online to do things for you and it wanted to hire a human worker to solve the capture puzzle for it now the human got suspicious it wrote to gp4 online uh what’s happening why do you need somebody to solve capture puzzles for you are you a robot the human asked are you a robot and gp4 said no I’m not a robot I’m a human but I have a vision impairment which is why I have difficulty with these capture puzzles then this is why I I want to hire you and the human was duped and solved the capture puzzle for gp4 now gp4 has no consciousness it has no feelings it was it didn’t feel anxious when the human kind of questioned it it didn’t feel happy when it managed to fool the human it was given a goal and it pursued this goal uh by making up for instance excuses that nobody told it what to do that’s that’s the kind of really amazing and frightening thing about these situations when Facebook gave uh the algorithm the uh uh aim of increased user engagement the managers of Facebook did not anticipate that it will do it by spreading hatefield conspiracy theories this is something the algorithm discovered by itself the same with the capture puzzle and this is the big problem we are facing with AI you conclude Nexus your book with a statement that the decisions we all make in the coming years will determine whether summoning this alien intelligence meaning AI proves to be a terminal error or the beginning of a hopeful new chapter in the evolution of life so I have that question what do you mean by we I mean you said that it’s just in the hands of a very few people uh how do we as uh people who don’t run Twitter Facebook uh how do we uh get involved and it starts from voting for the right people in elections that will reign in the immense power of these Tech Giants uh who are not elected by anybody or not really accountable to anybody and uh the these crucial decisions about shaping the future of humanity need to be made by people who represent the majority of us and not just by a few billionaires and Engineers um secondly it’s choices we each of us makes every day the key thing is to avoid the Trap of technological determinism the idea that once you develop a certain technology it can only go one way and there is nothing for us to decide here it’s never the case every technology can be used in a lot of of different ways you can use a knife to murder somebody or to save their life in surgery in the 20th century we saw that electricity and steam power and cars can be used to create totalitarian dictatorships or liberal democracies the same technology this is also true in the 21st century with AI it has enormous positive potential to create the best Health Care Systems in history to to help solve the climate crisis and it can also lead to the rise of dystopian totalitarian regimes and new empires and ultimately even the destruction of human civilization and the choice which way it will go it’s a choice that all of us need to take part in you have all knowah Harari thank you so much for joining us thank you