“If we don’t regulate it there will be an arms race for intimacy. Different AIs competing to create intimacy with us. Because the easiest way to persuade you to change your political views, to buy some product, to vote from some politician, is to create an intimate connection. And this will destroy democracy if we allow it to happen because democracy is a conversation between people. If it becomes a conversation between Bots and people, where the Bots have all the power, that’s the end of democracy. And again, this should be a very simple regulation, it’s not regulating the development of AI capable of forming intimacy, it just has to be very clear that it is illegal to counterfeit humans. For thousands of years we had laws that it’s illegal to counterfeit money. If we didn’t have these laws the economic system would have collapsed. It’s easy to counterfeit money but if you do that you go to jail for many many years. It should be the same with humans. Until now there was no technology that could do that, so there were no such laws, but there should be a very clear and very extreme law that if you or your platform counterfeits humans you go to jail to 20 years. Now it’s okay, you know, like we need AI doctors. It’s fine as long as the AI tells us it’s an AI and you interact with it. It tells you hello I’m an AI doctor do you want some advice on your whatever, that’s fine but impersonating a human being and then using it in order to manipulate you that should be outlawed.” — Yuval Hariri
Join journalist Pedro Pinto and Yuval Noah Harari as they delve into the future of artificial intelligence (A.I.). Together, they explore pressing questions in front of a live audience, such as: What will be the impact of A.I. on democracy and politics? How can we maintain human connection in the age of A.I.? What skills will be crucial for the future? And what does the future of education hold? Filmed on May 19 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal and produced by the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos (FFMS), in what marks the first live recording of the show: “It’s not that simple.”
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Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ (2014), ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’ (2016), ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ (2018), the graphic novel series ‘Sapiens: A Graphic History’ (launched in 2020, co-authored with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave), and the children’s series ‘Unstoppable Us’, (launched 2022). Yuval Noah Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, are the co-founders of Sapienship: a social impact company specializing in content and production, with projects in the fields of education and entertainment. Sapienship’s main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Yuval Noah Harari speaks internationally and teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On this channel you can see his interviews, lectures, and public conversations with prominent leaders and influencers, — including Mark Zuckerberg, Natalie Portman, Christine Lagarde, Chancellor Kurz of Austria, Jay Shetty, and Russell Brand.
HARIRI. So we need to know three things about AI first of all AI is still just a tiny baby we haven’t seen anything yet um real AI deployed into the world not in some laboratory or in science fiction is about like 10 years old and you know you look at the wonderful scenery outside of of all these plants and trees and you think about biological evolution the evolution of life on Earth took something like 4 billion years four billion years to reach these plants and to reach us human beings now ai is now at the stage like of I don’t know amoebas it’s like four billion years ago and the first living organisms are crawling out of the organic soup and so Chad GPT and all these wonders they are the amoebas of the AI world what would T-Rex look like and how long would it take for the AI amoebas to evolve into the T-Rexes and it won’t take billions of years maybe it takes just a few decades or a few years because the evolution of AI is in a completely different time scale than the evolution of organic beings because AI itself works on a different time scale AI is always on one of the computers in general are always on humans and other organic organisms they they live they exist they develop by Cycles we need to rest sometimes hey I never needs to rest now the other two things we need to know about AI is that first it’s the first technology ever that can make decisions by itself I hear a lot of people saying oh all these worries about AI every time there is a new technology people worry about it and afterwards it’s okay like when people invented writing and printing presses and airplanes they were so worried and in the end it was okay I will be the same it’s not the same no previous technology in history could make decisions you know even an atom bomb actually empowered humans because an atom bomb can destroy a city it cannot decide which city to bomb you always need a human to make the decision AI is the first technology that can make decisions by itself even about us increasingly we apply to a bank to get a loan it’s an AI making the decisions about us so it takes power away from us the third thing about AI that everybody needs to know it’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas you know the printing press radio television they broadcast they spread the ideas created by the human brain by the human mind they cannot create a new idea you know Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century the the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it but it did not create a single new page it had no ideas of its own about the Bible is it good is it bad how to interpret this how to interpret that AI can create new ideas can even write a new Bible we you know throughout history religions dreamed about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence by a non-human entity or every religion claims our book all the art books of the other religions they humans wrote them but our book no no no no it came from some superhuman intelligence in a few years there might be religions that are actually correct that just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI that could be a reality in a few years.
HARIRI. It’s moving faster than I think almost anybody expected faster than I expected despite all my engagement with the field and what I wrote in homo deals and 21 lessons I’m still surprised by how fast it is moving and how powerful the new generation of AI is and actually the new generation is not out it’s it’s in the Laboratories but it’s it’s already there it’s even much more powerful than chart GPT um and I think that to have a fighting chance we need time and I said before humans we are organic beings we move in Cycles we move on organic time and we are the most maybe the most adaptable animals on the planet but adaptation itself requires time and now we’ve reached a point when there is no time AI is moving too fast and I think that it’s the responsibility therefore of government to buy us Time by slowing it down.
HARIRI. Newspapers didn’t have data. Radios didn’t have data. It’s not just the data, it’s the decisions that radio did not push. You know radio did not tell you what to listen to you had to actively choose I want to listen to this station I want to listen to that station. What happened in social media over the last 10 years or so is that you had recommendation algorithms that actively push content to people recommending read this article watch this video and even more than that if you watch YouTube and you do nothing it keeps showing you one video after the other. You don’t need to do anything active you just sit there. I don’t know you start with I don’t know you want to know something about the 911 attacks so it starts with I don’t know a video from CNN and you do nothing within a couple of iterations it would show you the most outrageous conspiracy theories and the algorithm chose to show you that. And the algorithm is making the choice not randomly it has aims it was given an aim by the platforms to increase user engagement. Like they said okay today we have 200 million people watching 40 minutes a day by next year it should be 300 million people watching for 50 minutes a day. That was the aim of the algorithm go out and get us more eyeballs get us more minutes on our platform. And the algorithm went out and discovered by trial and error by experimenting on hundreds of millions of people that the easiest way to grab our attention to keep us watching more and more is to press the outrage button. If you have one video which with this outrageous conspiracy theory which encourages hate and polarization and you have another video which is much more moderate and calm the algorithm would go for the outrage because it increases user engagement. And this was this very primitive AI. And the AI of the present generation it can know you much much better than the AI say of 2016. And it can also generate the content by itself, it doesn’t need to wait for a human to create this outrageous fake news story. It can create the fake news story or video by itself. So again if we don’t regulate that the chances of democracies surviving are very very low because again the dictatorships will survive. Dictatorships they flourish on chaos and on mistrust. If you cause people to mistrust each other until they cannot agree on anything then the only way to still have a society is have a dictatorship. To have a democracy you need that people trust each other and can have a meaningful conversation .