Yuval Noah Harari: This Election Will Tear The Country Apart! AI Will Control You By 2034!

the humans are still more powerful than the AIS the problem is that we are divided against each other and the algorithms are using our weaknesses against us and this is very dangerous because once you believe that people who don't think like you are your enemies democracy collapses and then the election becomes like a war so if something ultimately destroys us it will be our own delusions not the AIS we have a big election in the United States yes democracy in the states is quite fragile but the big problem is what if surely that will never

happen youal Noah Harari the author of some of the most influential non-fiction books in the world today and is now at the Forefront of exploring the worldshaping power of AI and how it is beyond anything Humanity has ever faced before biggest social networks in the world they're effectively going to go for free speech what is your take on that the issue is not the humans the issue is the algorithms so let me unpack this in the 2010s there was a big battle between algorithms for human attention now the algorithms discovered when you look at history

the easiest way to grab human attention is to press the fear button the hate button the greed button the problem is that there was a misalignment between the goal that was defined to the algorithm and the interests of human society but this is how it becomes really disconcerting because if so much damage was done by giving the wrong goal to A Primitive social media algorithm what would be the results with AI in 20 or 30 years so what's the solution we've been in this situation many times before in history and the answer is always the

same which is are you optimistic I try to be a realist this is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the D of a CEO that work to put this together so from all of

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you from the bottom of my heart let's get to the conversation 10 years ago you made a video that was titled why humans run the world it's a very well-known Ted Talk that you did after reading your new book Nexus I wanted to ask you a slightly modified question which is do you still believe that 10 years from now humans will fundamentally be running the world I'm not sure it depends on the decisions we all take in the coming years but there is a chance that the answer is no that in 10 years um algorithms

and AIS will be running the world I'm not having in mind some kind of hollywoodian Science Fiction scenario of one big computer kind of Conquering the world it's more like a bureaucracy of AIS that we will have millions of AI bureaucrats everywhere um you know in the banks in the government in businesses in universities making more and more decisions about about our lives that um everyday decisions whether to give us a loan whether to accept us to a job uh and we will find it more and more difficult to understand the logic the rationale why

the algorithm refused to give us a loan why the algorithm accepted somebody else uh uh to for the job and um you know you could still have democracies with people voting for this president or this prime minister but um if most of the decisions are made by AIS and humans including the politicians have difficulty understanding the reason why the AIS are making a particular decision then power will gradually shift from Humanity uh to these new alien intelligences alien intelligences yeah I prefer to think about AI I I know that the acronym is artificial intelligence but

I think it's more accurate to think about it as an alien int intelligence not in the sense of coming from out of space in the sense that it makes decision in a fundamentally different way than than human mind artificial means or or have the sense that we design it we control it some something artificial is made by humans with each passing year AI is becoming less and less artificial and more and more alien uh yes we still design the kind of baby AIS but then they learn and they change and they start making uh unexpected

decisions and they start coming up with new ideas which are an alien to the human way of of doing things you know there was this famous example with the game of Go that in 2016 alpago defeated the world champion Lisa do but the amazing thing about it was was the way it it did it because humans have been playing go for 20 500 years a board game a board game a a strategy game developed in ancient China and considered one of the basic Arts that any cultivated civilized person in East in East Asia had to

know and tens of millions of Chinese and Koreans and Japanese played go for centuries entire philosophies developed around the game of how to play it it was considered a good preparation for politics and for life and people thought that they explored the entire uh uh realm the entire geography landscape of go and then alphago came along and showed us that actually for 2,500 years people were exploring just a very small bit a very small part of the landscape of go there are completely different strategies of how to play the game that not a single human

being came up with in more than 2,000 years of playing it and Alpha go came up with it in just a few days so this is alien intelligence and you know if it's just a game then but the same thing is likely to happen in finance in medicine in religion For Better or For Worse you wrote this book Nexus Nexus how do you pronounce it Nexus Nexus I'm not an expert on pronunciation so you could have written many a book um you're someone that's I think broadly curious about the nature of life but also the

nature of history for you to write a book that is so detailed and comprehensive there must have been a pretty strong reason why this book had to come from you now and why is that because I think we need a historical perspective on on the AI Revolution I mean there are many books about about AI this is Nexus is not a book about the about AI it's a book about the long-term history of information networks I think that to understand what is really new and important about AI we need perspective of thousands of years to

go back and look at previous information revolutions like the invention of writing and the printing press and the radio and only then you really start to understand what is happening around us right now uh one thing you understand for instance is that AI is really different people compare it to previous revolutions but it it's different because it's the first technology ever in human history that is able to make decisions independently and to create new ideas independently a printing press could print my book but it could not write it it could just copy my ideas an

atom bomb could destroy a city but it could it can't decide by itself which City to bom or why to Bone it and AI can do that and you know there is a lot of hype right now around AI so people get confused because they now try to sell us to sell us everything as AI like you want to sell this table to somebody oh it's it's an it's an AI table and this water this is AI water so people what is AI everything is AI no not everything um there is a lot of automation

out there which is not AI if you think about a coffee machine that makes coffee for you it does things automatically but it's not an AI it's pre-programmed by humans to do certain things and it can never learn or change by itself a coffee machine becomes an AI if you come to the coffee machine in the morning and the Machine tells hey based on what I know about you I guess that you would like an espresso it learned something about you and it it and and and it it makes independent decision it doesn't wait for

you to ask for the espresso and it's it's really AI if it tells you and and I just came up with a new drink it's called Buffy and I think you would like it that's really AI when it comes up with completely new ideas that we did not program into it and that we did not anticipate and this is a GameChanger in history it's it's bigger than the printing press it's bigger than the atom bomb you said we need to have a historical perspective and do you consider yourself to be a historian yes that that's

my my profession is a historian that that's kind of this is my training I was originally a specialist in medieval military history I wrote about the H Crusades and the 100 Years War and the strategy and lo Logistics of the English armies that invaded France in the 14th century this was my my first articles um and this is the kind of of perspective or of knowledge that I also bring to try and understand what's happening now with with AI because most people's understanding of what AI is comes from them playing around with a large language

model like chat PT or gemini or Gro or something that's like their understanding of it you can ask it a question and it gives you an answer that's really what people think of AI as and so it's easy to be a bit complacent with it or to see this technological shift as being trivial but when you start talking about information and they like disruption of the flow of information and information networks and when you bring it back through history and and you give us this perspective on the fact that information effectively glues us all together

then it starts to become for me I think about it completely differently I mean there are two ways I think about it I mean one way is that when you realize that as you said that information is is the basis for everything when you start to shake the basis everything can collapse or or change or or something new could come up for instance uh um democracies are made possible only by Information Technology democracy in essence is a conversation a group of people conversing talking trying to make decisions together dictatorship is a somebody dictates everything one

person dictates everything that's dictatorship democracy is a conversation now in the Stone Age hunter gatherers living in small bands they were mostly Democratic whenever the band need to decide anything they could just talk with each other and and decide as human societies grew bigger it just became technically difficult to hold the conversation so the only examples we have from the ancient world for democracies are small city states like Athens or republican Rome these are the two most famous examples not the only ones but the most famous and even the Ancients even philosophers like Plato and

Aristotle they knew once you go beyond the level of a citystate democracy is impossible we do not know of a single example from the premodern world of a large scale democracy millions of people spread over a large territory conducting their political Affairs democratically why not because of this or that dictator that took power because democracy was simply impossible you cannot have a conversation between millions of people when you don't have the right technology de large scale democracy becomes Possible only in the late modern era when a couple of information Technologies appear first the newspaper then

Telegraph and radio and and television and they make large scale democracy possible so democracy it's not like you have democracy and on the side you have these information Technologies now the basis of democracy is information technology so if you have some kind of Earth quake in the information technology like the rise of social media or the rise of AI this is bound to shake democracy which is now what we see around the world is that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people can't talk with each other the Democratic conversation is breaking

down and every country has its own explanation like you talk to Americans what's happening there between Democrats and Republicans why can't they agree on even the most basic facts and they give you all these explanations about the unique conditions of American history and Society but you see the same thing in Brazil you see the same thing in in France in the Philippines so it can't be the unique conditions of this or that country it's the underlying technological Revolution and the other thing that history kind of um that I I bring from history is how even

relatively small technological changes or seemingly small changes can have far-reaching consequences like you think about the invention of writing originally it was basically people playing with mud I mean writing was invented for the first it was invented many times in many places but the most the first time in ancient Mesopotamia people take clay tablets which is basically pieces of mud and they take a stick and they use the stick to make marks in the in the clay in the clay in the in the mud and this is the invention of writing and this had a

profound effect to give just one example um you think about ownership what does it mean to own something like I own a house I own a field so previously before writing to own a field if you live in a small Mesopotamian Village like 7,000 years ago you own a field this is a community Affair it means that your neighbors agree that this field is yours and they don't pick fruits there and they don't graze their sheep there because they agree it's yours it's a community agreement then comes writing and you have written documents and ownership

changes its meaning now to own a field or a house means that there is some piece of dry mud somewhere in the archive of the king with marks on it that says that you own that field so suddenly ownership is not a matter of community agreement between the neighbors it's a matter of which document sits in the archive of the king and it also means for instance that you can sell your land to a stranger without the permission of your neighbors simply by giving the stranger this piece of dry mud in exchange for gold or

silver or whatever so what a big change a seemingly simple invention like using a stick to to draw some some signs on a piece of mud and and now think about what AI will do to ownership like maybe 10 years down the line to own your house means that some AI says that you own it and if the AI suddenly says that you don't own it for whatever reason that you don't even know that's it it's not yours that that Mark on that piece of mud was also the invention of sort of written language and

I think I was thinking about when I was reading your book about how language holds our society together not in the way that we we often might assume as in me having a conversation with you but passwords um poet passwords uh like banking it's like our whole society is secured by language yeah and the first thing that the AIS have mastered is with large language models is the ability to replicate that which is which made me I think about all the things that in my life are actually held together with language even my relationships now

because I don't see my friends my friends live in Dubai and America and Mexico so we conversate in language our our relationships are held together in language and as you said democracies are held together in language um and now there's a more intelligent Force that's mastered that yeah it was so unexpected like you know five years ago people said AI will Master this or that self-driving vehicles but language nah this is such a complicated problem this is a the human Masterpiece language it will never Master language and CH GPT came and it is you know

I'm I'm a words person and I'm simply Amazed by the quality of the texts that uh these large language language models produce it's not perfect but uh they really understand the semantic field of words they can string words together and sentences to form a coherent text that that's really remarkable and as you said I mean this is the basis for everything like I give instructions to my bank with language if AI can generate text and audio and image then how do I communicate with the bank in a way which is not open to manipulation by

an AI but the tempting part in that sentence is you don't like communicating with your bank anyway as in calling them being on the phone waiting for another human so the temp the Temptation is know I don't like speaking to my bank anyway so I'm goingon to let the AI do that I'm gonna invest if I can trust them I mean the big question is I mean why does the bank want me to call personally to make sure that it's really me it's not somebody else telling the bank oh make this transfer to to I

don't know Cayman Islands it's really me and how do you make sure how do you build this is TR I mean the the Hall of Finance for thousands of years is just one question trust all these Financial devices money itself is really just trust it's not made from gold or silver or paper or anything it's how do you create trust between strangers and therefore most Financial inventions in the end they are linguistic and symbolic inventions it's not you don't need some complicated physics it's it's complicated symbolism and now AI might start creating new Financial devices

and and will Master Finance because it mastered language and and like you said I mean we now communicate with other people our friends all over the world you know in the 2010s there was a big battle between algorithms for human attention we're just discussing it before the podcast like how do we get the attention of people but there is something even more powerful out there than attention and that's intimacy if you really want to influence people intimacy is is more powerful than attention how are you defining Intimacy in this regard someone that you have a

long-term acquaintance with that you know personally that you trust that to some extent that you love that you care about um and until today it was utterly impossible to fake intimacy and to must produce intimacy you know dictators could must produce attention you know once you have for instance radio you can tell all the people in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Union the great leader is giving a speech everybody must turn their radio on and listen so you can Mass produce attention but this is not intimacy you don't have intimacy with the great leader

now with AI you can for the first time in history at least theoretically must produce intimacy with millions of maybe working for some government uh are faking intimate relationships with us which will be hard to to know that this is a bot and not a human being H it's interesting because when I I've had so many conversations with relationship experts and a variety of people that speak to the decline in human to human intimacy and the rise in loneliness and us becoming more um sexless as a society and all of these kinds of things so

it's it's almost with the decline in human to human intimacy and human- to human connection and the rise of the sort of AR the possibility of artificial intimacy it begs the question what the future might look like in a world where people are lonlier than ever more disconnected than ever but still have the same maslovian need for that connection and that feeling of you know love and belonging and maybe this is why we're seeing a rise in polarization at the same time because people are desperately trying to belong somewhere and the algorithm is like reinforcing

my echo chamber so you know and it's but I don't know how that ends I don't think it's deterministic it depends on the decision we make individually and as a society uh there are of course also wonderful things that this technology can do for us uh the ability of AI to hold a conversation the ability to understand your emotions it can potentially mean that we will have lots of AI teachers and AI uh uh doctors and AI therapists that can give us better health care services better Education Services than ever before instead of being you

know a kid in a class of 40 other kids that the teacher is barely able to give attention to this particular child and understand his or her specific needs and his or her specific personality you can have an A AI tutor that is focused entirely on you and that is able to give you a quality of Education which is really unparalleled I had this debate with my friend uh on the weekend he's got two young kids who are one years old and three years old and we were discussing in the future in sort of 16

years time where would you rather send your child would you rather send your child to be taught by a human in a classroom as you've described with lots of people lots of noise where they're not getting personalized learning so if the classroom are more intelligent they're being left behind if they're more intelligent they're being dragged back or would you rather your child sat in front of a screen potentially or a humanoid robot and was given really personalized tailored education that was probably significantly cheaper than say private education or university but you need the combination I

mean I think that the the for for many of the lessons it will be better to go with the AI tutor which again you don't even have to sit in in in front of a screen you can go to the park and get a a lesson on on on ecology just listening on on on as as you walk but you will need uh large groups of kids for break time because very often you learn the the most important lessons in school are not learned during the lessons they are learned during the breaks and this is

something that should not be automated uh you would still need large group of of children together with with human supervision uh for that the other thing I I thought about a lot when I was reading your book is this idea that I would assume that us having more information and more access to information would lead to more truth in the world less conspiracy more agreement but that doesn't seem to be the case no not at all uh most information in the world is junk I mean I think the best way to think about it is

it's it's like with food that there was a time like a century ago in many countries where food was scarce so people ate whatever they could get especially it was full of fat and sugar uh and they thought that more food is always good like if you ask your great grandmother she would yes more food is always good and then we reach a time of abundance in in in food and uh we have all these industrialized processed food which is artificially full of fat and sugar and salt and whatever and it's obviously ban for us

the idea that more food is always good no and definitely not all this uh junk food and the same thing has happened with information that information was once scarce so if you could get your hands on a book you would read it because it was nothing else and now information is abundant we are flooded by information and much f is junk information which is artificially full of greed and anger and fear because of this battle for attention um and it's not good for us so we basically need to go on an information diet that uh

again the first step is to realize that it's not the case that more information is always good for us we need a limited amount and we actually need more time to digest the information and we have to be off of course also careful about the quality of what we take in because uh again of the abundance of of junk information and the the basic misconception I think is this link between information and truth that people think okay if I get a lot of information this is the raw material of Truth and I more information will

mean more knowledge and that's not the case because even in nature most information is not about the truth the basic function of information in history and also in biology is to connect information is connection and when you look at history you see that very often the easiest way to connect people is not with the truth because the truth is a is a costly and and and rare kind of information it's usually easier to connect people with fantasy with fiction uh why because the truth tends to be not just costly the truth tends to be complicated

and it tends to be uncomfortable and sometimes painful if you think of you know like in politics uh a politician who would tell people the whole truth about their nation is unlikely to win the elections because every nation has these skeletons in the cuper and all these dark sides and dark episodes that people don't want to be confronted with so we see that politically it's not uh uh if you want to connect Nations religions political parties you often do it with fictions and Fantasies and fear um I was thinking about sapiens and the role that

stories play um in engaging our brains and I was thinking a lot about the narratives in the UK we have a narrative where we we're told that much of the cause of the problems we have in society are employment um other issues with crime are because there's people crossing from France on boats and in the U and it's a very effective narrative to get people to band together to march in the streets and in America obviously the same Narrative of the wall and the southern border um they're crossing our border in the millions it's their

rapists it's then they're not sending their good people they're coming from mental institutions has galvanized people together and those people are now like marching in the streets and voting based on that story that is a fearful story it's a very powerful story because it connects to something very deep in inside us uh and if you want to get people's attention if you want to get people's engagement so the fear button is one of the most efficient most effective buttons to press in the human mind and again goes back to the Stone Age so if you

live in a stone age tribe uh one of your biggest worries is that the people from the other tribe will come to your territory and you will take your food or we will kill you um so this is a very ingrained fear in not just in humans in every Social Animal you they did experiments on chimpanzees that show that chimpanzees have a also a kind of almost instinctive H fear or disgust towards foreign chimpanzees from a different band and politicians and religious leaders and and and they learn how to play on these uh uh human

emotions almost like you play on a piano you know originally these feelings like discussed they evolved in order to help us um you know on the most basic level discuss is there because you know as as especially as a kid you want to experiment with different foods but if you eat something that is bad for you you need to to to you know puke it you need to to to throw it out so you have discuss protecting you but then you have religious and political leaders throughout history hijacking this defensive mechanism and teaching people from

a very young age to not just to fear but to be disgusted by foreign people by people who look different and this is again you as an adult you can learn all the theories and you can educate yourself that this is not true but still very deep in your mind if that there is a a part that is just these people are disgusting these people are dangerous and uh we saw it throughout history how many different movements have learned how to use this uh uh emotional mechanisms to to motivate people we we we sit down

at a very interesting time youal because two quite significant things have happened in the last I think year as it relates to information and many of the things we've been talking about one of them is Elon Musk bought Twitter and his real mandate has been this idea of free speech and as part of that mandate he's unblocked a number of figures who were previously blocked on Twitter um a lot of them right leaning people that were blocked for a variety of different reasons and then also this week Mark Zuckerberg released basically a letter publicly and

in that letter he says that he re regrets the fact that he cooperated so much with the FBI the government when they asked him to censor things on Facebook one particular story he says he regrets doing that and it looks like if you read between what he's saying well he actually says it explicitly he says we're going to push back harder in the future if governments or anybody else asks us to censor certain messaging now what what I'm seeing is that Twitter which is one of the biggest social networks in the world and meta the

biggest social network in the world have now taken this dance that effectively they're going to let information flow they're effectively going to go for this free speech narrative now as someone that's used these platforms for a long time specifically X or Twitter it is crazy how different it is these days there are things that I see every time I scroll that I never would have seen before this free speech um position now I'm not taking a stance whether it's good or bad it's just very interesting and there's clearly an algorithm that is now really like

if I scroll if I go on X right now I will see someone being killed with a knife I reckon within 30 seconds and I will see someone getting hit by a car um I will see extreme islamophobia potentially um but then I'll also see the other side so it's not just I'm saying I'll see all of the sides and when you talking earlier about like is that good for me I I had a flashback to my friend this weekend it was my birthday so my me and my friends were together just looking over at

him mindlessly scrolling these like horror videos on Twitter as he was sat on my left thinking God he's like frying his dopamine receptors and I just I just think this whole new like free speech movement what is your take on this idea of free speech in the role you know only humans have free speech Bots don't have free speech the tech companies are constantly confusing us about this issue because the issue is not the humans the issue is the algorithms and let let me explain what I mean if the question is whether to ban some

somebody like Donald Trump from Twitter I agree this is a very difficult issue and we should be extremely careful about banning human beings especially important politicians from voicing their views and opinions however much we dislike their opinions or or them personally it's a very serious matter to ban any human being from from a platform but this is not the problem the problem on the platform is not the human users the problem is the algor ithms and the companies constantly shift the blame to the humans in order to protect their business interests so let let me

unpack this humans create a lot of content all the time they create hateful content they create ceremon on compassion they create cooking lessons biology lessons so many different things a flood of information the big question is then what gets human attention everybody wants attention now uh the companies also want attention the companies give the algorithms that run the social media platforms a very simple goal increase user engagement make people spend more time on Twitter more time on Facebook engage more sending more uh uh likes and recommending to their friends why because the more time we

spend on the platforms the more money they make very very simple now the algorithms made a huge huge Discovery by experimenting on millions of human guineapigs the algorithms discovered that if you want to grab human attention the easiest way to do it is to press the fear button the hate button the greed button and they started recommending to users to watch more and more content full of hate and fear and greed to keep them glued to the screen and this is the deep cause of the epidemic of fake news and conspiracy theories and and and

so forth and the the defense of of the companies is we are not producing the content somebody a human being produced a hatefield conspiracy theory about immigrants and it's not us it's like a bit like I don't know the the the chief editor of the New York Times publishing a hatefi conspiracy theory on the front of the first page of the newspaper and when you ask him why did you do it or you blame him look what you did he says I didn't do anything I didn't write the piece I just put it on the

front of the New York Times that's all that's nothing it's not nothing people are producing immense amount of content the algorithms are the king makers they are the editors now they decide what gets viewed sometimes they just recommend it to you sometimes they actually auto play it to you like you you you chose to watch some video at the end of the video to keep you glued to the screen the algorithm immediately without you telling him it the algorithm without you telling the algorithm the algorithm autop plays some kind of video full of fear or

greed just to keep you glued to the screen it is the algorithm doing it and this should be banned or this should at least be uh uh supervised and regulated and this is not free freedom of speech because the algorithms don't have freedom of speech uh yeah the person who produced the hatefield video I would be careful about banning them but that's not the problem it's the recommendation which is the problem the second problem is that a lot of the conversations now online are being overrun by Bots again if you look for instance at Twitter

X as an example so people often want to know what is trending what which stories get the most attention if everybody's interested in in in a particular story I also want to know what everybody's talking about and very often it's the Bots that are driving the conversation because a particular story initially gets a lot of traction a lot of traffic because a lot of bots Retreat it and then people see see it and think they don't know it's Bots they think it's humans so they say oh lots of humans are interested in in this so

I also want to know what's happening and this draws more attention this should be forbidden buts are uh very basically you cannot have ai pretending to be human beings this is fake humans this is counterfeit humans if you see activity online and you think it's human activity but actually it's bought activity this should be banned and doesn't uh uh uh harm the free speech of any human being because it's a bot it doesn't have freedom of speech I was thinking a lot about what you said about these algorithms are actually running running the world and

I mean yeah so if the algorithms are deciding what I see based on what I spend my time looking at because they want to make you know the platforms want to make more money and if I have a innate sort of predisposition to spend more time focused on things that scare me yeah or then you just have to give me a couple of years and every year that goes past I'll become more fearful more it reinforces your own weaknesses I mean again it's like the food industry so the food industry discovered we liked food with

a lot of salt and and and fat in it and gives it more to us and then it says but this is what the customers want what do they want from us it's the same thing but even worse with these algor algorithms that because this is the food for the mind yes humans have a tendency that if something is very frightening or something fills them with anger they they focus on it and they tell all the friends about it but to artificially amplify it it's not it just it's just not good for our Mental Health

and Social Health it is using our own weaknesses against us instead of helping us deal with them is it fair to say now this is me just jumping to conclusions a little bit but is it fair to say that in a world where you remove um restrictions around blocking certain characters right-wing characters that are their messages maybe based on immigration Etc you remove those restrictions so they're all allowed on every platform and then you program the algorithm to be focused on Revenue that eventually more people will become right-wing and I say that in part because

it's it's a right-wing narrative to say that immigrants are bad and that you know I'm not saying that the left are innocent because they're absolutely not but I'm saying that the fearful narratives the fear seems to come more from the right in my opinion MH like especially in the UK it was the fear comes from immigrants and these people are going to take your money and all these kinds of things um I I I think the key issue is to not to label it as a right or left issue because again democracy is a conversation

and you can have a conversation only if you have several different opinions and it's I think it should be okay to have a conversation about immigration that people should be able to have different opinions about it uh that's fine the problem starts when uh one side vilifies and and demonizes anybody who doesn't think and you see it to some extent from both sides but in in the case of immigration so you would have these conspiracy theories that anybody who supports immigration for instance they want to destroy the country they are part of this conspiracy to

flood the country with immigrants and to change its nature and and whatever and this is the problem that uh democracy once you believe that people who don't think like you they are not just your political Rivals they are your enemies they are out to destroy you they intend to destroy your way of life your group then democracy collapses because there can be no way uh between enemies democracy doesn't work it works if you think that the other side is wrong but there are still essentially good people who care about the country who care about me

but they have different opinions if you think that they are my enemies they try to destroy me then the election becomes like a war because you're fighting for your survival you would do anything to win the election because your survival is at stake if you lose you have no incentive to accept the verdict if you win you only take care of your tribe and not of the enemy tribe what if you don't believe the election is legitimate then democracy can't function uh this is the again the basic democracy can't exist in just any it's like

it's like a delicate plant that needs certain conditions in order to survive and to flourish and one condition for instance is that you have information technologies that allows a conversation another condition is that you trust the institutions if you don't trust the institution of Elections it doesn't work and and a third condition is that you need to think that the people on the other side of the political divide they are my rivals but they are not my enemies now the problem with what's happening now with Democratic conversations is because of this tendency to go to

more and more and more extremes it creates the impression that the other side is is an enemy and this is a problem not just for the right also for the left that on both sides you see this this uh uh uh feeling that the other side is the is an enemy and that its positions are completely illegitimate and if we reach that point then the conversation collapses and it should be possible to have complex conversations and discussions about difficult issues like immigration like gender like climate change without seeing the other side as an enemy which

was possible for you know for Generations so why is it that now it seems to just become impossible to talk with the other side or to about anything we have a big election in the United States this year very big one yeah do you think a lot about it uh yes yes I mean it seems like a very L it will be a coin TOS I mean like 50/50 um you know elections become really an existential issue if there is a chance they will be the last elections if one side is intends to Simply change

the rules of the game if it comes to power then it becomes existential because again democracy works on the basis of self-correcting mechanisms that this is the big advantage of democracy over dictatorship in a dictatorship a dictator can make a lot of good decisions but sooner or later they will make a bad decision and there is no mechanism in a dictatorship to identify and correct such mistakes mistakes like Putin yeah there is just no mechanism in Russia that could say Putin made a mistake he should go he should let somebody else try a different course

of action this is the great advantage of democracy you try something it doesn't work you try something else but the big problem is what if you choose someone who then changes the system neutralizes its self-correcting mechanism and then you cannot get rid of him anymore this is what happened for instance in Venezuela that or originally Chavez and the chavista movement they came to power democratically people wanted to let's try this and now in the last elections a couple of weeks ago um the evidence is very very clear that Maduro lost big time but uh he

controls everything the election committee everything and he claims no I won and the they destroyed Venezuela you know it's something like a quarter of the population fled the country which was one of the richest countries in in South America before and they just can't get get rid of the guy surely that will never happen in the west oh don't say never in history uh uh history can can catch up with you whoever you are that's one of the Illusions we Venezuela was part of the West in in many ways still is this is one of

the Illusions we live under though we think oh that that can never happen to the UK or the United States or Canada these sort of of quote unquote civilized Nations you know According to some measurements democracy in the United States is quite new and quite quite fragile if you think about it in terms of of who gets to vote for instance so um it's yeah it would be again I don't know what are the chances but even if there is a 20% chance that a trump Administration would change the rules of the game of American

democracy in such a way to as to make it for instance by uh uh changing the rules about who votes or how do you count votes H that it will become almost impossible to get rid of them uh that's not that that's not out of the possible in historical terms do you think it's possible that Trump will do that yes I mean you saw it on the 6th of January I mean the the the most sensitive moment in in every democracy is the moment of transfer of power and the magic of democracy is that democracy

is meant to ensure a peaceful transfer of power that as I said like you choose one party you give them a try after some time if people say they didn't do a good job let's try somebody else and you know you have people who hold in the United States they hold the biggest power in the world the president of the United States have enough power to destroy human civilization all these nuclear missiles all this Army and he loses the election and he says okay I give up all this power and I let the other guy

try this is this is amazing and this is exactly what Trump didn't do he from the beginning I mean even from 2016 he refused they they asked him directly if you lose the election will you accept the results and he said no and um in 2020 he did not hand power peacefully he tried to prevent it and the fact that he is now running again and I I think to some extent the lesson he got from the sixth of January is that I can basically get away with anything at least with my people with my

base that it was like a a a test a try if I do this extreme thing and they still support me afterwards it basically means they will support me no matter what I do I'm I'm wondering in a world of um such a fragile democracy when information Flows In networks are disrupted by something like AI if misinformation and disinformation and the ability for me to make a video I could make a video right now of Donald Trump speaking and saying something in his voice um and I could help that video go viral like how do

you hold together democracy and communication when you don't believe anything that you're seeing online H and we're just at the start of this now so I we haven't seen anything yet this is just really the the first baby steps I'm going to play a video on the screen right now so people can see and for those listening you'll just hear it but I'm going to play a video that Isaac over there in the corner of the room made of me speaking in this chair and it wasn't me and I didn't say it and I wasn't

in this chair hey there this is AI Steve do you think I'll be able to take over the dire of a CEO one day leave your comments below and it sounds EX like me identical and it's not me and I I wonder this with you know mo most of us get our political information and our information generally now from social media yeah from and if I can't believe anything that I'm seeing because it's all easy to make some kid in Russia in their bedroom could make a video of the Prime Minister here um I don't

know where we get our information from anymore how we the answer is institutions we've been in this situation many times before in history and the answer is always the same institutions you cannot trust the technology you trust the institution that verifies the information think about it like with with print that um you can write on a piece of paper anything you want you can write the prime minister of Britain said and then you open quotation marks and you put something into the mouth of the Prime Minister you can write anything you want and when people

read it they don't believe it or they they shouldn't believe it just because it's written that the prime minister said it doesn't mean that it's true so how do we know which pieces of paper to believe as an institution we would believe or greater chance we will believe if on the front page of the New York Times or of the Sunday Times of the Guardian you will have the British prime minister said open quotation marks blah blah blah because we don't trust the paper or the Inc we trust the institution of the guardian of the

or the Wall Street Journal or whatever with videos we never had to do that because nobody could fake them so we trusted the technology if we saw a video we said ah this is this has to be true but when it becomes very easy to fake videos then we revert to the same Principle as with Sprint we need an institution to verify it if we see the video on the official website of CNN or of the Wall Street Journal than we believe it because we believe the institution backing it and if it's just something on

Tik Tok we know that you know any kid can do that why why should I believe it so now we are in the transition period we are still not used to it so when we see a video of Donald Trump or Joe Biden the video still gets to us because we grew up in a time when it was impossible to fake it but I think very quickly people will realize you can't trust videos you can only trust the the institutions and the the question is will we be able to produce uh to create to maintain

trustworthy institutions fast enough to save the Democratic conversation because if not if you can't believe anything this is the ideal for dictators uh uh when you can't trust anything the only system that works is a dictatorship because democracy works on trust but dictatorship works on terror on fear you don't need to trust anything in a dictatorship you don't trust anything you fear uh for democracy to work you need to trust for instance that some information is reliable that the election committee is impartial that the courts are just and uh uh if more and more institutions

are attacked and people lose trust in them then then then democracy collapses uh but going going back to to to information so one option is that the old institutions like newspapers and TV stations uh uh they will be the institutions that we trust to verify certain videos or we will see the emergence of new institutions and the again the big question is whether uh we'll be able to develop trust in them and I specifically say institutions and not individuals no large scale soci Society especially not a Democratic Society can function without trustworthy bureaucratic institutions and

will those bureaucratic institutions be AI That's the big question because increasingly AIS will be the bureaucrats and what do you mean by bureaucrats what's the word bureaucrat what does that mean oh uh that that's a very important question because uh uh human civilization runs on bureaucracy bureaucrats are essentially officient in government that TR not just in government it's I mean the origin of the word bureaucrat it comes from French from the 18th century and bureaucracy is is means the the rule of the writing desk is to rule the world or to rule Society with pen

and papers and documents like the example we gave in the very beginning about ownership so there you own a house because there is a document in some archive that says that you own it and a bureaucrat produced this document and if you now need to retrieve it then this is the job of of a bureaucrat to find the right document at the right time and all big uh uh uh systems run on it hospitals and schools and corporations and Banks and and sports associations and libraries they they all run on these documents and and the

bureaucrats who know how to read and write write and find and file documents one of our big problems is that it's it's it's difficult for us to understand bureaucratic systems because there are a very recent development in human evolution and this makes us suspicious about them and we tend to uh believe all kinds of uh uh conspiracy theories about the Deep State and about what what's going on in all these bureaucracies and it's really complicated and it's going to be more complicated as more of the decisions will be made by AI bureaucrats and AI bureaucrat

means that decisions like how much money to allocate to a particular issue will no longer be made by a human official it will be made by an algorithm and when people decide why when people ask why is the switch system broken why didn't they why didn't they give enough money to fix it I don't know the algorithm just decided to give the money to something else why will bureaucracies be run by AI over people like why will at some point a nation decide that in fact AI can is better at making these decisions first of

first of all it's not a future development it's already happening more and more of the decisions are being made by AIS and this is just because the amounts of information you need to take into account are are enormous and it's very difficult for humans to do it it's much easier for the AIS to do it if all these people you know bureaucrats lawyers accountants it sounds like I I always wonder you know what are humans going to be left to do in your book you say that AI is going to far AI is going so

far beyond human intelligence that it should actually be referred to alien intelligence now if it goes so far beyond human intelligence it's my asson that most of the work that we do is based on intelligence so even like me doing this podcast now this is me asking questions based on information that I've gathered based on what I think I'm interested in but also based on what I think the audience will be interested in and compared to AI I'm a like a little monkey like I you know what I mean if if an AI has an

IQ that is 100 times mine in in source of information that is a fat million times bigger than mine there's no need for me to do this podcast I can get an AI to do it and in fact an AI can talk to an AI and deliver that information to a human but then if we look at most Industries like being a lawyer um accountancy I mean a lot of Med the medical profession is based on information um driving I think that's the biggest employer in the world is the profession of driving whether it's delivery

or Uber or whatever it is um where where do humans belong in this complex anything which is just information in information out is ripe for automation these are the easiest jobs to automate um like being a coder like being a coder or again like being an accountant at least certain types of accountants lawyers doctors they are the easiest to automate if a doctor the only thing they do is just take information in all kind of results of blood tests and whatever and they information out the they diagnose the disease and they write a prescription this

will be easy to automate in the coming years and decades but a lot of jobs they require also social skills and motor skills if your job requires a combination of skills from several different fields it's it's not impossible but it's much more difficult to automate it so if you think about a nurse that needs to replace a bandage to a crying child this is much much harder to automate than just a doctor that writes a prescription because this is not just data the nurse needs uh uh good social skills to interact with the child and

motor skills to just replace the bandage um so this is harder to automate and uh there will even for people who just deal with information there will be new jobs the problem will be the retraining and not just you know retraining in terms of of acquiring new skills but psychological retrain training how do you kind of reinvent yourself in a new profession and do it not once but again and again and again because as the AI Revolution unfolds and we have just at the very beginning of it we haven't seen anything yet so there will

be old jobs disappearing new jobs emerging but the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish and then there will be a new wave of new jobs and people will have to reinvent themselves four five six times to stay relevant and this will create immense psychological stress so many of the big companies are also working at the same time on humanoid robots there's this humanoid robot race going on and by humanoid robots I mean you know Tesla have their humanoid robot I think it's called Optus which they're developing and it'll cost you know X thousands of

pounds and and I watched a video of it recently where it can do quite delicate sort of motor skill based stuff so probably clean the house it can probably work on the production line can probably put things in boxes um and I just wonder when we say you know people are going to lose their jobs in a world where you have humanoid robots and you have intelligence that's beyond us and you combine the two where these humanoid robots are very very intelligent I go I don't know what I'm like where did the the unemployed go

to to to find these new professions like obviously it's it's difficult to forecast the new professions of the future history tells us then but I but I can't get I can't figure out what the new professions are I mean my girlfriend does breath work I guess the breath work part is quite easy to disrupt but then she takes women away for retreats in Portugal and stuff so I'm like okay she's going to kind of be safe because these women are going there to connect with humans and to be in this little special place offline intentionally

so Retreats she'll probably be fine yeah anything that you know there are things that we want in life which are not just about solving problems like I'm sick I want to be healthy I want my problem solved but there are uh um many things that we want to have a connection like if you think about sports um robots or or or machines can run much faster than people for a very long time now and we just had the Olympics and people are not very interested in seeing robots running against each other or against people because

what really makes Sports interesting in the end is the human weaknesses and the ability of humans to to deal with their weaknesses and and human athletes still have jobs even though in in again in many lines like running you can have a machine run much faster than the world champion I thought about this the other day and uh uh and another example is is priests like one of the easiest jobs to automate is the priesthood of at least certain religions because you just need to repeat the same texts and and gestures again and again in

in specific situations like if you have a wedding ceremony then um you know the priest just need to repeat the same words and there you are you're married now we don't think about priests as being in danger of being replaced by robots um because what we want from a priest is not just the mechanical repetition of certain words and gestures we think that only another frame flesh and blood human who knows what is pain and love and and who can suffer only they can connect us to the Divine so most people would not be interested

in having the wedding conducted by a robot even though technically it's very easy to do it now the big question of course what happens if AI gains Consciousness this is like the trillion dollar question of of of AI Consciousness then it's all bets are off but that's a a different and very very big discussion I mean whether it's possible how would we know and and so forth do you think it's possible we have no idea I mean we don't understand what Consciousness is we don't know how it emerges in the organic brain so we don't

know if there is an essential connection between Consciousness and organic biochemistry so that it can't arise in an inorganic uh silic based computer there is a big confusion first of all should be said again between Consciousness and intelligence um intelligence is the ability to reach goals and solve problems Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate humans and other animals we solve problems through our feelings our feelings are not something on the side they are a main method for how to deal with the world how to solve problems

now so far computers they solve problems in a completely different way than humans again they are alien intelligence they don't have any feelings when they win a game of chess they are not joyful when they lose a game they are not sad they don't feel anything now we don't know how organic brains produce these feelings of pain and pleasure and love and hate so this is why we don't know whether an inorganic structure based on silicon and not carbon whether it will be able to generate such things or not that's I think the biggest question

in in in science and um so far we have no answer isn't Consciousness just like a hallucination isn't it just like an illusion that I think I'm conscious because I've got at the circuitry which tells me that I am effectively it tells me through a bunch of like feelings and things that I'm conscious like I think I'm looking at you now I think I can see you the feeling is real I mean even if we are all it's like the Matrix and we are all in how do you know it's real it's the only real

thing in the world I mean there is nothing I everything else is just conjuncture we we only experience our own feelings what we see what we smell what what we touch this we actually experience this is real then we have all these theories about why do I feel pain oh it's because I stepped on a nail and there is such a thing in the world as a nail and whatever it could be that we are all inside that a big computer on the planet ziron run by superintelligent mice if I spoke to an AI I

could get an AI to to tell me that it feels pain and sadness that's that that's the that's a big problem because there is a huge incentive to train AIS to pretend to be alive to pretend to have feelings and and and we see that there is a huge effort to to to to produce such AIS and in truth because we don't understand Consciousness we don't have any proof even that other humans have feelings I feel my own feelings but I never feel your feelings I only assume that you're also a conscious being and Society

grants uh this a status of a conscious entity to not only to humans but also to some animals not based on any scientific proof but based on social convention like most people feel that their dogs are conscious that their dogs can feel pain and pleasure and love and so forth so Society accepts most societies that dogs are sentient beings and they have some rights under the law now as AI become even if AI has no feelings no consciousness no sentience whatsoever but it becomes very good at H uh pretending to have feelings and convincing us

that it has feelings then this will become a a social convention that people will feel that their AI friend is is a conscious being and therefore should be granted rights and there is even already a legal path for how to do it at least in the United States you don't need to be a human being in order to be a legal person it's funny because you mentioned you kind of alluded to the fact jokingly that we might just be in like a simulation it was one of you like well maybe we're just in a simulation

but could be and it's funny because in a world of AI I think my belief in that as a possibility has only increased this is in fact just a simulation because I've watched us go from when I was born not really having internet access to now being being able to kind of speak to this alien on my computer that can like now do things for me and having virtual reality experiences which are sometimes quite indistinguishable where my my you know I fall into the Trap of believing that I am inside squid games because I've got

this headset on and you play it forward and you play it forward and you play it forward and you imagine any rate of improvement then I hear the the arguments for simulation Theory and I go do you know probably if you play this forward a 100 years you know like at the rate we're on the rate of trajectory we're on then we will be able to create information networks and organisms that don't in like a laboratory or in a computer that don't necessarily realize yeah they're in the computer especially with like what's going on with

it's already happening to some extent you know these information bubbles that more and more people live inside them it's still not the whole physical world but you get the same event and people on say different parts of the political political spectrum they just can't agree on anything they live in their own metries MH and you know the the when when when the internet came along for the first time the main metaphor was the web the worldwide web a web is something that connects everything and now the main metaphor which is uh uh the the simulate

this simulation theory is is is is is is representing this new metaphor the new metaphor is the cocon it's a web that turns on you and en closes you from all sides so you can no longer see anything outside and there could be other cocoons with other people in there and you have no way to get to them yeah no nothing that happens in the world can connect you anymore because you're in different cocoons you've only got to look at someone else's phone you've only got to look at someone else's Twitter or X or Instagram

is this the same reality it is so different I do you know what I was talking about over the weekend my friend was at to my left scrolling he clicked on the Discovery section which is where you find new content I looked down at his phone and was like it's all Liverpool Football Club it's like the entire feed is Liverpool and my entire feed is completely different and I was just thinking wow he lives in a completely different world to me because he's a Liverpool fan I'm a Manchester United fan and and it's yeah just

and to think about that like to think that when you open your phone and many of us are spending up to 9 hours a day on our mobile phones you're experiencing a completely different window into a completely different world than I am and and this was you know this this is a very ancient fear because um for instance Plato wrote exactly about that in the most famous Parable I think from Greek philosophy is the the allegory of the cave in which PL imagines a theoretical scenario an imaginary scenario of of a group of prisoners chained

inside a cave with their face to a blank wall in which Shadows are being projected from behind them and they mistake the shadows for reality and he was basically describing you know people in front of his screen just mistaking the screen for reality and you have the same thing in Ancient India with Buddhist and Hindu sages talking about uh uh Maya which is the world of Illusions and the Deep fear that maybe we are all trapped inside a world of illusions that the the most important thing that we think in the world uh the the

wars we fight we fight Wars over Illusions in our mind and uh this is now becoming technically possible like previously it was these philosophical thought experiments now part of what is interesting as a historian about the present era is that a lot of ancient philosophical problems and discussions are becoming technical issues that yes you can suddenly realize PLO cave in your phone so scary I find it really scary because you're right like I think right now some people might say that they have some kind of grasp over like the ranking system or why something shows

up when I search it or whatever but as these intelligence aliens become more and more powerful um it's of course we would have less understanding because we're like handing over the decision in some Industries they are now completely the king makers like I'm here on a book tour I wrote Nexus so I go from podcast to podcast from TV station to TV station to talk about my book but the the the entities I'm really trying to impress of the algorithms M because if I can get the attention of the algorithms the humans will [Laughter] follow

H yuck uh you know that's that's our real we are basically kind of carbon creatures in a silicon world I used to think we were in control though and now I feel like the Silicon in control uh control is Shifting that that's we are still in control to some extent we are still making the most important decisions but not for long and this is why we have to be very very careful about the decision we make in the in the next few years because uh in 10 years in 10 in 20 years it could be

too late by then the algorithms will be making the most important decisions you talk about a couple of um big dangers you see with the algorithms in Ai and the sort of shift and disruption of information one of them is this alignment problem which um how would you explain the alignment problem to me in a way that's simple to understand so the classical uh kind of example is a thought experiment invented by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2014 which sounds crazy but but you know bear with it um he imagines a super intelligent uh AI

computer which is bought by a paperclip Factory and the paperclip manager tells the AI your goal the reason I I bought you your goal your your entire existence you're here to produce as many paper clips as as possible that's your goal and then the AI conquers the entire world kills all humans and turns the entire planet into factories for producing paper clips and it even begins to send itions to outer space to turn the entire galaxy into just paperclip production industry and the point of the thought experiment is that the AI did exactly what it

was told it did not rebel against the humans it did exactly what the boss wanted but of course it was not the the strategy it chose was not aligned with the real intentions with the real interests of the of the human Factory manager who just couldn't foresee that this will be the result now this sounds like outlandish and ridiculous and crazy but it already happened to some extent and we talked about it this is the whole problem with social media and user engagement in the very same years that Nick Bostrom came up with this thought

experiment in 2014 the managers of Facebook and YouTube they told their algorithms your goal is to increase user engagement and the algorithms of social media they conquered the world and turned the whole world into user engagement which was what they were told to do we are now very very engaged and again they discover that the way to do it is with outrage and with fear and with conspiracy theories and this is the alignment problem when Mark Zuckerberg told the Facebook algorithms increase user engagement he did not foresee and he did not wish uh that the

result will be collapse of democracies wave of conspiracy theories and fake news hatred of minorities he did not intend it uh but this is what the algorithms did because there was a misalignment between the uh uh the way that the algorithm the goal that was defined to the algorithm and the interests of of human society and even of the human managers of of the companies that that are deployed these algorithms and this is still as a small scale disaster because the social media algorithms that uh uh created all this social chaos over the last 10

years they are very very primitive AI this is like the the amibas of if you think about the development of AI as an evolutionary process for this is still the amoeba stage the amoeba being the very simple the very simple life forms the the beginning like a single cell life form we are still in evolutionary terms organic evolution we are like billions of years before we will see the dinosaurs and the mamals or the humans but digital evolution is billions of times faster than organic evolution so the distance between an AI amoeba and the AI

dinosaurs could be covered in just a few decades if CH GPT is the amiba how would the AI Tyrannosaurus Rex would like would would look like and this is where the alignment problem becomes really disconcerting because if so much damage was done by giving kind of the wrong goal to A Primitive social media algorithm what would be the results of giving a misaligned goal to a T-Rex AI in 20 or 30 years the issue at the heart of this is you know some people might think okay just give it a different goal but when you're

dealing with private companies who are listed on the stock market there really is only one goal that keep that exactly that benefits survival so all of the platforms have to say you know the goal of this platform is to make more money and to get more attention because also it's mathematically easy and there is a huge huge problem in how to define for AIS and algorithms the the goal in a way they can understand now the the great thing about make money or increase user engagement is that it's very easy to measure it mathem atically

MH uh one day you have a million hours being watched on YouTube then next a year later it's 2 million very easy for the algorithm to see hey I'm making progress but let's say that that Facebook would have told its algorithm increase user engagement in a way that doesn't undermine democracies how do I measure that who knows what is the definition for the robustness of De of democracy nobody knows so defining the go of the algorithm as increase user engagement but don't harm democracy almost impossible this is why they go for the kind of of

of easy goals which are the most dangerous but even in that scenario if I told if I'm the owner of a social network and I say increase user engagement but don't harm democracy the problem I have is my competitor who leaves out the second part and just says increase user engagement is going to beat me because they're going to have more users more ibles more Revenue advertisers are going to be happier then my company is going to falter investors are going to pull out that's a question because there are two things to take into consideration

first of all uh you have governments governments can regulate and they can penalize a social media company that defines goals in a socially responsible way just as they penalize newspapers or TV stations or or or or car companies that uh behave in an antisocial way the other thing is that uh um humans are not stupid and self-destructive that uh uh if we we would like to have better products in the sense of also socially better products and I I gave earlier the example with food diets like think how much yes the food companies they discovered

that uh uh if they fill a product artificially with lots of fat and sugar and salt people would like it but people discovered that this is bad for their health so you now have a like for instance a huge market for diet products and people are becoming very aware of what they eat the same thing can happen in the information Market the cost though is like 80 70 80% of people in the US have like chronic disease and are obese and you know life expectancy is now looks like it's going the other way a little

bit in in the western world and and it's I don't know I just feel like with um with policing consumption of goods like alcohols nicotine food seems much more simple than policing information and the flow of information Beyond you know beyond racism or like inciting violence I don't know how you police we already covered the the two most basic and Powerful uh tools are to hold companies liable for the actions of their algorithms not for the content that the users produce but for the actions of the algorithms uh I don't I don't think we should

penalize Twitter or Facebook if somebody post uh a a racist post um I would be very careful about penalizing Facebook for that because then who decides what is racism and so forth but if the algorithm of of Facebook deliberately spreads some racist conspiracy theory that's the algorithm that's not human Free Speech how do you know it's a racist conspiracy theory though okay so now now we get to the to the difficult conversation but this is something that we have the courts for and I would be very very careful about having the courts judge on the

content of uh the production of individual users but when it comes comes to uh algorithms deliberately routinely spreading a particular type of of information like a conspiracy theory we can involve the courts the the key issue is who has liability that it's the company that is liable for the what the algorithm is doing and not the human individual liable for what they are saying um and another key distinction here is between private and public like part of the problem is the Erasure of the boundary between the two I think that humans have a right to

stupidity in private that in your private space with your friends and you with your family you have a right to stupidity you can say stupid things you can tell racist jokes you can tell homophobic jokes it's not good it's not nice but you're a human being you're allowed to do that but not in public I mean even for politicians like as a gay person if the Prime Minister tells a a homophobic joke in private I don't need to care about that that's his or her business but if they say it in public on on television

that's a huge problem now traditionally it was very easy to distinguish private from public you are in your private house with a group of friends you say something stupid that's private it's n Nobody's Business you go to the town square and you stand on on a pedestal and you shout something to thousands of people that's public here you can be punished if you say something racist or homophobic of outrageous but it it was easy for you to know now the problem is you go let's say on WhatsApp you think you're just talking with two of

your friends and you say something really really stupid and then it it gets viral and it's all over the place and and uh I don't have an an easy solution for that but um one one measure which is adopted by some governments is for instance that uh uh people who have a large following they are held to a different standard than people who don't even on the the most basic thing of identifying yourself as a human being uh we don't want that everybody would have to get some certification from the government to talk with their

friends on on WhatsApp but if you have a 100,000 followers online we need to know that you are not a bot that you're actually a human being and again this is not covered by freedom of speech because Bots don't have freedom of speech the slippery slope right because I've I've gone back and forth on this argument of anonymity and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing for social networks and the rebuttal that I got when I lent to the side of um iding people is that like totalitarian governments will use that as a

way to basically punish the people who are speaking the totalitarian governments are doing it whether we like it or not it's it's not a question that if the British do it then the Russians will say okay so we'll also do it the Russians are doing it anyway will Americans start to do it will they start to if if someone speaks out against Trump and he has access to their identity and information can he go look at them and get them arrested if we reach that point when the courts will allow such a thing then we

are in very deep trouble already and uh what we should realize is that with the surveillance technology now in existence a totalitarian government has so many ways to know who you are that it's that's not the the main issue right you talked about um the platforms being responsible for the consequences yes in the UK over the last month we've had I don't know if you've heard that we had of riots and um I think it was all triggered originally when there was news that broke that a someone had murdered some young children yes and there

was a confusion or sort of a misinformation around that person's religion and that meant that people Pro that's an excellent example because you know if I personally privately say to just two of my friends I think the person who did it is ex I don't think we should be you should be persecuted for that I could say it in my private living room and it's the same thing if I say it on WhatsApp or or on Facebook but if a Facebook algorithm picks up this piece of fake news and starts recommending it to more and

more users then Facebook is liable for the action of its algorithms you can you should be able to take it to court and say the algorithm deliberately recommended a piece of fake news and again if if the fake news was produced by an influencer with a million followers then it's also his he is also liable for that but if if a private individual in a private setting uh um said something which is not true it's fake news and then an algorithm deliberately spread it the main fault is with the algorithm and the people who should

be in jail are the managers of the company that owns this algorithm and not the individual who uttered the words going back to the riots issue let's say that I don't know the guardian on the day of of of the riots decided to pick up a piece of of this fake news and publish it on its front page and they now go take the editor of the Guardian to court and he says but I didn't write it I just found this piece of fake news and decided to put it on the front page of the

Guardian now it would be obvious to us that the editor did something very very very wrong and he might or she might have to sit in jail and it's not the problem of the person who originally produced the piece of fake news if you're the editor of one of the biggest newspaper in in the country and you decide to publish something on your front page you had better be very very sure that what you're publishing is the truth especially if it can incite to violence how would a social network owner know that how would they

be able to verify that everything is true at that scale not everything but if uh for instance something is likely to lead to violence and the very first it's a precautionary principle first of all do no no harm again I'm I'm not asking Facebook to censor the piece of fake news I'm only asking it don't get your algorithms to spread it on purpose in order to get user engagement and make a lot of money if you are not sure about it just don't spread it it's as easy as that how does it know it's fake

news versus it thinking that it's actually really important life- saving news so for example that's the responsibility of of of of of the company again like how does the editor of the Guardian know or of the financial times or of the Sunday times how do they know if something is true and if something should be published on the front page if you are now managing a social media company you are managing one of the most powerful uh uh newspapers in the world and you should have the same kind of responsibilities and the same kind of

expertise if you have no idea how to judge whether an algorithm should recommend something to millions of people you in the wrong business you know if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen don't run a social media company if you don't know what should be shown to millions of people one of the it's very P because obviously Mark Zuckerberg's letter that he wrote this week says I was approached by the FBI who told me that Russia were trying to in influence the elections and they were given some information that there was this

laptop story Joe um Joe Biden Hunter Biden who Joe Biden's son had this laptop story which Facebook didn't know if it was real or not and they thought maybe it was a Russian um plant I Russia had put the story there to try and make sure Joe Biden didn't win the elections so Facebook deprioritized it stopped it going viral and suppressed it turns out it was a real story and it wasn't fake and Mark Zucker says he regrets suppressing it because it was in fact a real real story and in suppressing it he kind of

in influenced the election to some degree mhm um so it's so complicated to the point that I just complicated to run a big Media Company it's complicated to run the Wall Street Journal or Fox News again what happens if if the FBI comes to Fox News or comes to the Wall Street Journal and tells them look there is this story planted by the Russians don't encourage it and later on it turns out that it was wrong um could happen and as the manager of the Wall Street Journal you need to deal with it and do

I trust the FBI under what conditions sometimes I should sometimes I should be suspicious I feel like you're can end up in jail H you're the editor of the Wall Street Journal you're gonna end up in jail either way because either way you're influencing elections and if you influ but that's the business I mean the real problem is when you have extremely powerful people like zukerberg or Elon Musk that pretend that they don't have power that they don't have influence that they don't shape shape elections we know for centuries that the owners and editors of

newspapers they shave elections and therefore we hold them to certain standards and now the owners and managers of platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook they have more power than the New York Times or the guardian or the Wall Street Journal and they should be held to at least the same degree of accountability and their stick that oh we are just a platform we just allow everybody to publish what they want it doesn't work like that and we don't accept it with traditional media so why should we accept it with that's that's the whole trick

of these tech companies that again we have thousands of years of history and they tell us oh it doesn't apply to us like if you have a traditional industry like cars it's obvious to everybody you cannot put a new car on the road unless you made some safety checks to make sure the car is safe you cannot put a new medicine in the on the market or a new vaccine on the market without safety that's obvious right but when it comes to algorithms no no no no no that's a different set of rules H you

can put any algorithm you want on the market you don't need any safety rules and even more basic than that you think about something like theft you have the Ten Commandments don't steal and you know people know yes you shouldn't steal until it comes to information ah no no no it doesn't apply to information I can can take your information and without your permission do all kinds of things with it and sell it to third parties and this is not stealing don't steal doesn't apply to my line of business and this is what the tech

Giants have been doing in many cases over the last decade or two telling us that history doesn't apply to them that all the wisdom that Humanity gained in a very painful way over centuries and thousands of years of dealing with dictatorships and with uh uh uh whatever it doesn't apply to the new technology and and it does it does apply do you ever feel tempted to just log off and just like go live in a field somewhere maybe like a desert maybe just create a little bit of a cult and I do it every year

oh really yeah I take a long Meditation Retreat of between 30 days and 60 days uh like this year I plan in December after the book tour is over to go 60 days from meditational retreat in India and just completely disconnect no smartphone no internet not even books or or or or or writing paper just just the information fast why it's good for the mind uh again like with food too much in isn't good for us we need time to digest and to detoxify and it's true of of the mind as well if you just

keep bombarding it with more um it's you get addicted to the wrong WR things you develop bad habits and um you need or at least I need um time off in order to really kind of digest everything that happened and to um decide what I want and what I don't want what kind of habits addictions I should I should try to to to to be rid of and also to you know to get to know my own mind when the mind is constantly bombarded by information from outside you it's so noisy you cannot get to

know it because there is so much noise but when the noise uh uh is is goes away then you can start to understand what is the mind how does it function how does it work where do thoughts come from what is fear what is anger when you're boiling with anger because of something you just you now read you are focused on the object of your anger but you can't understand the anger itself the anger controls you when you have an information fast you can just observe what happens to me when I'm angry what happens to

to to my mind to my body how does it control me and this is more important than any angry story in the world to understand what anger actually is it's it's very very difficult I mean how many times do people stop and just you know try to get to know their anger and not the object of the anger this we do all the time we kind of Replay we we heard something terrible that a politician we don't like like I don't know somebody's angry about Trump so he would replay it again and oh he said

like this he did like that he will do this he will do that and you don't get to know your anger that way I have about 50 different companies in my portfolio at flight group now some of which I've invested in and some of which I've co-founded or founded myself one thing I've noticed is that most companies don't put enough effort into their hiring process in my mind the first and most critical thing in business is assembling your group of people because the definition of the word company is group of people and throughout all of

my companies whenever I'm looking to hire someone my first Port of Call is LinkedIn jobs who I'm happy to say are also a sponsor of this podcast they've helped us Source professionals who we truly can't find anywhere else even those who aren't actively searching for a new job but who might be open to a perfect role in fact over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites so if you're not looking on LinkedIn you're probably looking in the wrong place so today I'm giving the dire of the CEO Community a free LinkedIn job

post head to linkedin.com doac now and let me know how you get on terms and conditions apply so interesting I was playing out the scenario in my head as you speaking of this future where there's almost these two species of human you have one species of human who are connected to the information um Highway through the internet through the neuralink in their brain that's just like they're hooked and the algorithm is feeding them information and they're acting upon it and they're feeding it and then you have this other group of people who decided to reject

that who didn't get the neuralink who aren't trying to interface with AI and that are living in a tribe in some jungle somewhere and I like my girl said this to me many years ago she's going I think there's going to be a split yeah and I kind of like you know whatever but now I'm like I can see why as things get more extreme you go you know what I'm going to make a decision here and especially when I saw the neuralink that Elon musk's working on that allows you to control computers with your

brain I sat on and the computer to control your brain also it both it go both you're right actually didn't think about that but I just imagined um and this is a question for everyone listening if there's you and me and I have the chip in my brain that now humans have in their brain that they're using to control computers with I am a different species to you because I can control the I can control my car downstairs I can control the lights in this room I can I can ask my brain questions and get

the answers my IQ becomes 5,000 yours is still 150 or 200 yours is probably 250 but I'm a different species to I have such a huge competitive advantage over you that if you don't get the chip um then you you're screwed that's speciation yeah again on a small scale we saw it before in history there were the people who adopted the written document and the people who rejected it right and they are not with us anymore because the people who adopted the written document they built these kingdoms and Empires and they conquered everybody else um

and we are in danger of the same thing happening and this is not a good thing because it's not like life was better for the people with the documents in many cases life was better for the hunter gatherers who lived before so what's the solution if I had to you know having read your book brilliant book Nexus a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI what is the solution how do we how do we stop the alignment problems us all becoming paper clips the social chaos the misinformation the the Silicon curtain

as you talk about in the book how do we stop these things destroying our world is there is there hope are you optimistic the key is is is is cooperation is connection between humans I mean the humans are still more powerful than the AIS the problem is that we are divided against each other and the algorithms unintentionally are increasing the Divide again this is the oldest rule of every Empire is divid and rule this was the rule of of the Romans of of the British Empire if you want want to rule a place you divide

the people of that place against one another and then it's easy to manipulate and control them uh this is now happening to the entire human species with AI that just as we had kind of you know the the Iron Curtain in the Cold War now we have the Silicon curtain dividing not just China from the US but also Democrats from Republicans also one person from another person and all of us from the AIS which increasingly make the decisions about all that uh we still have the power for I don't know 5 years 10 years 20

years to to to make sure it doesn't go in dystopian Direction but for that we need to cooperate are you optimistic um I try to be a realist I mean the last few I mean I just came from Israel and I saw a country destroying itself for no good reason whatsoever I it's a country that just pressed the self-destruct button and for no good reason and it can happen on a global scale what do you mean I press the self-destruct button it's not just the war between Israelis and Palestinians but Israel Society turning against itself

greater and greater Division and animosity and uh it's it's like a a a a dark hole of uh uh of of anger and of violence which is sucking more and more people in you know all over the world you now feel the shock waves from this dark dark hole in the Middle East and there is no good reason there is no objective reason if I'll say something about the Israeli Palestinian conflict there is no objective reason for it it's not like there is not enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River that people have

to fight for the little land there is or there is not enough food there is enough food for everyone to eat there is enough land to build houses and and hospitals and schools for everyone why do people fight because of different stories in their minds they have these different mythologies that God gave this whole place just to us you have no right to be here and they fight over that and uh um this is a local or Regional tragedy it can happen on a global scale again if if something ultimately destroys us it will be

our own delusions not the AIS the AI they get their opening because of our weaknesses because of our delusions yal thank you so much for writing a book I think this book is one of the most well-timed books um that I've ever come across because of everything that's happening in the world right now and it really helped me to understand that the problem isn't necessarily me versus you if you're on the other side of the aisle the problem is information the networks of information that we consume who's controlling those networks of information um somebody is

manipulating us to be on different side not just to be on different sides but to see each other as enemies and right now that's a person but it might not be soon it might not be a person no and understanding that I think helps us focus on the root cause of of issues that are sometimes hard to identify I I think the problem is my neighbor I think it's that person with different color skin but actually if look one level deeper it's the information networks and what I'm being exposed to that are brainwashing me and

creating those stories and as you talk about in your previous book stories are ultimately what are running the world and it's and it's this wonderful the Nexus is just a wonderful book at a wonderful time that helps us to access um this knowledge of the power of information and and how it impacts democracy and relationships and society and business and everything in between um in a way that I hope will lead to action and I think that is something to be optimistic about yeah ultimately I think most humans are are good they're good people yeah

when you give people bad information they made bad decisions the problem is not with the humans it's with the information amen you we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves the question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for oh okay and the question left for you is what does it mean to be strong um to to accept reality as it is uh to deal with reality without trying to hide it disappear it uh put a veil over it so interesting I think you're right

I think you're right certainly not the answer I would have given but you know you come what would you say um oh what would I say I guess I probably would have spoken to like perseverance in the face of a lot of different difficulties and one of those is is information but it's just that that idea of like persevering towards whatever your subjective goal is in the face of and in spite of a variety of different difficulties maybe that strength um so that could be raising a kid or it could be going to the gym

or whatever but I like your definition as well because I think it's much more um important in the times we find ourselves in and there's honestly as a podcaster you sometimes feel like you're caught right in the middle of it because I think everyone's trying to figure out if I'm like on the right wing on the left wing if I believe this if I endorse every guest that I sit with and you almost have to try and remain impartial H but it's very very uh difficult to for people to understand that because they want you

to fit somewhere and they want because that's weakness I mean you have a lot of people who who claim to be very strong who admire strength as as as a value yeah but they can't deal with parts of reality that don't fit into their worldview or their desire yeah and they think that strength is I have the strength to just make these parts of reality disappear yeah and no this is weakness and again sorry for going back to that but but this is also the war like what is war is trying to disappear a part

of reality that you don't like in this case an entire people I don't like these people I don't think they should be in reality so I try to make them disappear and people say oh he's a very strong leader is not he's a very weak leader that a strong leader would be able to acknowledge no these people exist they are part of reality let's now find out how do we live with them amen your book Nexus a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI is a must read for everybody that listens

to this podcast and that has any interest in these subjects at all it's endorsed by two of my favorite people Mustafa Solomon but also Steven fry and Rory stwart who's a great person as well as well um and it's endorsed for a very good reason because it's a completely mind expanding book written from someone who only writes exceptional culture shifting books so I'm going to link it below and I highly recommend anybody that's listened to this conversation and that's interested in this subject matter to go and get this book right now it's available right now

for pre-order and then it's shipping in five days from now when it releases so be the first to read it um and hopefully be the first to understand and action some of the things that you learn in this book y thank you so much for your time thank you isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in

the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend

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