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Yuval Noah Harari and Aza Raskin | The Making and Unmaking of Humanity Fundraiser | Commonwealth Club of California

If you’ve ever doubted the power of information for good and evil, don’t miss this program. The New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and Unstoppable Us, joins us to discuss the issues raised in his latest book, NEXUS, the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, humans have accumulated enormous power. But despite all of our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in something of an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that some fear could annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, an author who has sold 45 million books in 65 languages, and the co-founder of Sapienship—an international social-impact company focused on education and storytelling. Harari has a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, and is currently a distinguished research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his new book NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Harari looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Join us for an exploration of the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscover our shared humanity. Aza Raskin is is co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that focuses on transforming the incentives that drive technology, from social media to artificial intelligence. October 3, 2024 Speakers Yuval Noah Harari Author, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI; X @harari_yuval Aza Raskin Co-founder, Center for Humane Technology In Conversation with Shirin Ghaffary Reporter, Bloomberg News; X ‪@shiringhaffary5990‬

“The Turning Point Is it bad? Just to stop for a moment and try to understand what is happening, what kind of really turning point in history we are at? Because for tens of thousands of years, humans have lived inside a human made culture. We are cultural animals like we live our lives and. We constantly interact with cultural artifacts, whether it’s texts or images, stories, mythologies, laws, currencies, financial devices. It’s all coming out of the human mind. Some human, some were invented. This and up till now, nothing on the planet could could do that. Only human beings. So any and any song you encounter, any image, any currency, any religious belief, it comes from a human mind. And now we have on the planet something which is not human, which is not even organic. It functions according to a completely alien logic in this sense and is able to generate such things at scale are in many cases better than most humans, maybe soon, better even than the best humans. And we are not talking about a single computer. We are talking about millions and potentially billions of these alien agents. And is it good? Is it bad? Live it aside. Just think that we are going to live in this kind of new hybrid society in which many of the decisions, many of the inventions are coming from a non-human consciousness? Now, I know that many people here in the States, also in other countries now, immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics. And without getting into the discussion, who is right, who is wrong? Obviously, we have a lot of people very worried that immigrants are coming and they could take our jobs and they have different ideas about how to manage the society. And they have different cultural ideal ideas. And we are about in this sense, to face the biggest immigration wave in history coming not from across the Rio Grande, but from California, basically. And these immigrants from California, from Silicon Valley,” — Hariri

“Ilya, one of the founders of OpenAI, says he expects in the next couple of decades the world to be covered in data centers and solar cells.” — Raskin

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