Why humans won against neanderthals | Yuval Noah Harari and Lex Fridman | Lex Clips
Answer: Group cooperation in very large numbers (and intelligence).
“Money is the most successful story ever told, much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in God or in the same God, but almost everybody believes in money, even though it’s just a figment of our imagination. You know you take these green pieces of paper dollars, they have no value you can’t eat them, you can’t drink them and today most dollars are not even pieces of paper they are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason that you have the best storytellers in the world, the bankers, the finance ministers, all these people they are the best storytellers ever and they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information it is worth a banana, and as long as everybody believes it, it works.” — Yuval Noah Harriri
how did it all start how did Homo sapiens uh I’ll compete the others the other human-like species the Neanderthals and the other um homo species you know and on the individual level as far as we can tell we were not Superior to them neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us and not just other human species other animals too if you confirm me personally to an elephant to a chimpanzee to a pig I’m not so I I can do some things better many other things worse if you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee an elephant and a pig I wouldn’t bet on me being the the the the best Survivor uh the the one that come comes is successful if I may interrupt for a second I just I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps relevant to Optimus the robot and uh The Chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching okay with their fingers they can only do this kind of pinching and this kind of pinching is very useful for fine manipulation about precise manipulation of objects so don’t be so hard on yourself you have uh I said that I can do some things better than a chimp but you know if Elon musk’s goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee you know this won’t help you this won’t help you against the chimpanzee good point and similar if you want to climb a tree if you want to do so many things my bets will be on the chimp not on either no fair enough so I mean you have advantages on both sides um and what really made us successful what made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability but our Collective ability our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers chimpanzees knows know how to cooperate say 50 chimpanzees 100 chimpanzees as far as we can tell from archaeological evidence this was also the case with Neanderthals uh Homo sapiens about 70 000 years ago gained an amazing ability to be to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers you start seeing the formation of large networks political commercial religious um items being traded over thousands of kilometers ideas being spread autistic fashions and and this is our secret of success chimpanzees neanderthals can cooperate say a hundred we you know now the global trade network has 8 billion people like what we eat what we wear it comes from the other side of the world countries like China like India they have 1.4 billion people even Israel which is a relatively small country say 99 million citizens that’s more than the entire population of the planet ten thousand years ago of humans so we can build these huge networks of cooperation and everything we we’ve accomplished as a species from you know building the pyramids to flying to the moon it’s based on that and then you ask okay so what makes it possible for millions of people who don’t know each other to cooperate in a way that neander tells our chimpanzees couldn’t and at least my answer is stories is fiction it’s the imagination if you examine any large-scale human cooperation you always find fiction as as its basis it’s a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together it’s most obvious in cases like religion you know you can’t convince a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight a war or build a cathedral by promising to them if you do that after you die you go to chimpanzee heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts no chimpanzee will ever believe that humans believe these stories which is why we have these huge religious networks but it’s the same thing with modern politics it’s the same thing with economics people think oh economics this is rational it has nothing to do with fictional stories no money is the most successful Story Ever Told much more successful than any religious mythology not everybody believes in God or in the same God every but almost everybody believes in money even though it’s just a figment of our imagination you know you take these green pieces of paper dollars they have no value you can’t eat them you can’t drink them and today most dollars are not even pieces of paper they are just electronic information passing between computers we value them just for one reason that you have the best storytellers in the world the bankers the finance ministers all these people they are the best storytellers ever and they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information it is worth a banana and as long as everybody believes it it works so at which point does a fiction when it’s sufficiently useful and effective and improving the global quality of life does it become like accept the reality like there’s a threshold which is just you know people believe it it’s like with money you know if you start a new cryptocurrency if if you’re the only one that believes the story I mean again you you cryptocurrencies you have the math of course but ultimately it’s storytelling you’re selling people a story if nobody believes your story you don’t have anything but if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars again why I mean you can’t eat it you can’t drink it it’s nothing it’s the story around the the math which is the real magic is it possible that the story is the primary living organism not the Storyteller so that somehow humans uh Homo sapiens evolved to become these like hosts for a more intelligent living organism which is the idea and the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing so this is one of the sort of big perspectives behind your work that’s really revolutionary how you’ve seen history but do you ever kind of uh take out the perspective of the ideas as the organisms versus the humans it’s it’s an interesting idea there are two opposite things to say about it on the one hand yes absolutely if you look long term in history it’s all the people die it’s the stories that compete and survive and spread and stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes their lives for the story um you know we know in Israel this is one of the most important story factories in human history and this is a place where people still kill each other every day over stories I don’t know if you’ve been to Jerusalem right so people like Jerusalem Jerusalem Jerusalem you go there I’ve lived in Jerusalem in much of my life you go there it’s an ordinary place you know it’s a town you have buildings you have Stones you have trees you have dogs and cats and pedestrians it’s a regular place but then you have the stories about the place oh this is the place where God revealed himself this is the place where Jesus was this is the place was Muhammad was and it’s the stories that people fight over nobody is fighting over the stones people are fighting about the stories about the stones and the stories if if a story can get millions of people to fight for it um it not only survives it spreads it can take over the world the other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive because they don’t feel anything this goes back to the question of Consciousness which I think is the most important thing that the Ultimate Reality is consciousness is the ability to feel things if you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not you need to ask can it suffer um stories don’t feel anything countries which are also stories Nations don’t suffer if a nation loses a war it doesn’t suffer the soldiers suffer the civilians suffer animals can suffer you have an army with horses and whatever and the horses get wounded the horses suffer the nation can’t suffer it’s just in a it’s just an imagination it’s just a fictional story in our mind he doesn’t feel anything similarly when a bank goes bankrupt or a company goes bankrupt or when a a currency loses its value like Bitcoin is worth now zero crashed or the dollar is worth zero it crashed the dollar doesn’t feel anything it’s the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable so we have this complex situation when history is largely driven by stories but stories are not the Ultimate Reality the Ultimate Reality is is feeling feelings of humans of animals and the tragedy of History is it very very often we get it we get the order wrong stories are not bad stories are tools they are good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering but very often we forget it we instead of using the stories for our purposes we allow the stories to use us for their purposes and then you start in tile Wars because of a story you inflict Millions uh suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story and that’s the tragedy of human history so the fundamental property of life of a living organism is the capacity to feel and the the ultimate feeling is suffering you know to know if you’re happier or not it’s a very difficult question yeah but when you suffer you know yes and also in in ethical terms it’s more important to be aware of sufferings than of any other emotion if you’re doing something which is causing all kinds of emo all kinds of emotions to all kinds of people first of all you need to notice if you’re causing a lot of suffering to someone if some people are like it and some people are bothered by it and some people are a bit angry in you and some people are suffering because of what you do you first of all have to know oh now sometimes you still have to do it you know the world is a complicated place I don’t know you have an epidemic uh governments decide to have all that social isolation regulations or whatever so in certain cases yes you need to do it even though it can cause tremendous suffering but you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very very you have to ask yourself again and again and again is it worth it is it still worth it and uh the interesting questionnaire implied in your statements is that suffering is a pretty good component of a touring test for Consciousness this is the most important thing to ask about AI can can suffer because if if I can suffer then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection it needs rights just like humans and animals well quite a long time ago already so I work with a lot of robots legged robots but I’ve even had inspired by a YouTube video I had a bunch of roombas and I made them scream when I touched them or kick them or when they run into a wall and the uh the illusion of suffering from for me silly human anthropomorphizes things is as powerful as suffering itself I mean you you immediately think the thing is suffering and I think uh some of it is just a technical problem but it’s the easy easily solvable one how to create an AI system that just says please don’t hurt me please don’t shut me off I miss you uh where have you been be jealous also what what where have you been gone for so long your calendar doesn’t have anything on it so this kind of this this create through words the perception of uh of suffering of jealousy of Anger of all those things and it just seems like that’s not so difficult to do that’s part of the danger that um it basically hacks our operating system and it uses some of our best qualities against us it’s very very good that humans are attuned to suffering and that we don’t want to cause suffering that we have compassion that’s one of the most wonderful thing about humans and if we now create AIS which use this to manipulate us this is a terrible thing you’ve kind of I think mentioned this uh do you think it should be illegal to to do these kinds of things with AI to create the perception of consciousness of saying please don’t leave me or sort of basically um simulate some of the human-like qualities yes I think again we have to be very careful about it and uh and if it if it emerges spontaneously we need to be careful and we can’t rule out the possibility that AI will develop Consciousness we don’t know enough about Consciousness to be sure so if it develops spontaneously we need to be uh uh to to um be very careful about how we understand it but if people intentionally design an AI that they know they assume it has no consciousness but in order to manipulate people they use again this human strength this human uh the the noble part of our nature against us this should be should be forbidden and similarly a more General level that it should be forbidden for an AI to pretend to be a human being that it’s okay you know there’s so many things we can use AIS as teachers as doctors and so forth and it’s good as long as we know that we are interacting with an AI we should the same way we ban fake money we should ban fake humans it’s not just Banning deep fakes of specific individuals it’s also Banning deep fake of generic humans you know which is already happening to some extent on social media like if you have lots of bots retweeting something then you have the impression oh lots of people are interested in that that’s important and this is basically the Bots pretending to be humans because if you see a twit which says 500 people retwitted it or you you see a a tweet and it says 500 Bots which will delete I don’t care what the parts we created but if it’s humans okay that’s that’s interesting so we need to be very careful that Bots can’t do that they are doing it at present and it should be banned now some people say yes but we know of expression no Bots don’t have freedom of expression there is no cost in terms of freedom of expression when you ban Bots so again in some situations yes AIS should interact with us but it should be very clear this is an AI talking to you oh this is an AI retweeting this story it is not a human being making a conscious decision to push back on this line of fake humans because I think it might be a spectrum first of all you might have ai systems that are offended uh hurt when you say that they’re fake humans um in fact they might start identifying as humans and and you just talked about the power of us humans with our collective intelligence to take fake stories and make them quite real so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real uh you know love is a kind of fake thing that we all kind of put a word to a set of feelings what if you have that feeling for an AI system it starts to change I mean maybe uh the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do for good they’re allowed to uh create communicate suffering communicate it the good stuff the longing the the hope the connection the intimacy all of that um and in that way get integrated in our society and then you start to ask a question on are we allowed to really unplug them are we allowed to really censor them remove them remove their voice I’m not saying social media they shouldn’t have a voice they shouldn’t talk with that I’m just saying when they talk with us it should be clear that they are AI that’s it don’t you can have your voice as an AI again I mean I I have some medical problem I want to get advice from an AI doctor that’s fine as long as I know that I’m talking with an AI that what should be banned is AI pretending to be a human being this is something that will erode trust and without trust Society collapses this is something that especially will endanger democracies because democracies are built on Democracy is a conversation basically and uh it’s a conversation between people if you’re not flood the public sphere with millions and potentially billions of AI agents that can hold conversations they never sleep they never eat they don’t have emotions of their own they can get to know you and tailor their words specifically for you and your life story they are uh becoming better than us at creating stories and uh ideas and so forth if you flood the Public’s fair with that this will ruin the conversation between people it will ruin the trust between people it’s you will no longer be able to have a democracy in this situation you can have other types of regimes but no democracy