Kara Swisher & Yuval Noah Harari on Tech Bros, Witches & the Information Flood

hi everybody so I'm very excited to be back here last time I was here um uh I was talking about my own book with Sam Alman who did an excellent job a little frightening how good he was as an interviewer uh for my book but I'm very excited um uh I've interviewed uh you've all SE I think several times um but I'm super excited that he wrote a book about AI really but it's actually about the history of information because he's a historian uh by trade and so I'm super excited to talk about that um

I'm thrilled you're all here you missed the vice presidential debate it's probably a good thing it's probably this is much more interesting uh and we won't be talking about eating dogs so that's good that's we're already way ahead um and uh and I'm very excited I he needs no introduction what an amazing man what an amazing author and this book uh is sure to be another bestseller uh you've come out yal Harari great so um so we have a lot of questions and then we'll get to questions from the audience at the end um we

can't see you very well right now so apologies if I don't uh but we will bring up the lights when you ask questions um but I've got a a bunch of them this is actually going to be uh put on on with Cara swis sure on the podcast so it'll so react it'll be it should be really interesting and a great discussion so welcome to city arts and lectures it's great to see you again and thanks for joining me thank you it's really good to be here with you so we're here to talk about your

latest book Nexus a brief his a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI it's not brief uh it's quite a large and long book and from the Stone Age to AI in like 400 Pages it's quite all right okay fine okay all right okay if you say so um your first bestseller sapiens obviously brief history of humankind I like to use brief all the time came out in 201 and honestly these books could kill a small dog thingy of dogs um and then you wrote homod Deus a brief history of tomorrow

in 2015 and again despite the titles are not so brief so let's talk about what you were trying to do with Nexus and how it it relates to these other books that you wrote and why you decided to do this and then we're going to get into history first so I mean it picks up where I left off with sapiens and with homodeos the two main questions at the basis of the book is first of all if humans are so smart why are we so stupid like we've managed to take over this planet to reach

the moon to split the atom to the cipher DNA and here we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system with us in several different ways could be ecological collapse could be nuclear war could be the rise of AI so what's wrong with us MH and you know this is a question that has bothered people throughout history and you have a lot of answers in mythologies and theologies that tells us that uh there is something wrong with us there is something wrong with human nature and Nexus takes a different view

uh the problem is not in our nature the problem is in our information if you give good people bad information they will make bad decisions right and self-destructive decisions and then the book goes on to explore the long-term history of information why isn't information getting better I mean you would have expected that over thousands of years our information will get better and it really doesn't large scale uh modern societies right are as susceptible to mass delusion and really Insanity like Mass Insanity as Stone Age tribes if you think about the 20th century with stalinism and

Nazism I mean far more powerful of course than stone age right tribes a lot more sophisticated Information Technology but still can be extremely delusional and when you look at the world today we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are unable to hold a rational conversation anymore you know there's a techn ology term for that which is very technical which is garbage in garbage out right um and I think a lot it explains quite a bit of it in really kind of very easy simple way but the point you're making is this

is historical this is a historical thing it's just more sophisticated in the garbage that we're making for ourselves correct but the the garbage is is not accidental and it's it's effective in one important thing it's effective in creating order and the one of them key ideas of the book is that humans control the world because we can cooperate in larger numbers than any other animals and to create a large scale Cooperative system you need two things which pull you in different directions you need to know truth some truth about the world MH but you also

need to preserve order between large numbers of people thousands millions billions and the truth is not the easiest way to do it in most cases uh Fiction and Fantasy and down downright lies are more effective in creating order among people so one of the things that I think about a lot today and we'll get into this in a minute I want to get to history first is the idea that that technology and information is either a tool or a weapon technology used whether it's the printing press whether it's Papyrus it's both used as both it

will always be used as a weapon no matter what happens in every historical a spear is well spear is always a weapon but um a lot a knife is a better example it's a tool and a weapon um obviously AI is very hot right now but you know in homod deas you you discuss the benefits and dangers of new information technology especially if humans lose control um and you write in Nexus that since homod deas your conversations about a have gone from being idle philosophical speculations to having quote focused intensity of an emergency room why

what is that conversation right now from your perspective about AI MH I mean there are two conversations one is simply understanding what we are facing what is AI why is it dangerous what is the threat and a lot of people have H A difficulty grasping it it's not like nuclear weapons right that the danger was obvious andle a war which will just kill everybody what's the what's the danger in Ai and Hollywood I think uh this did is a good big service in focusing attention on on that issue long before anybody else thought about but

it focused on the wrong scenario mhm if you think about the Terminator or the Matrix the focus is on the big robot Rebellion right the moment the AIS decide to take over the world and wipe us out and this is unlikely to happen anytime soon because AI doesn't have the kind of broad intelligence necessary to build a robot army and take over a country or or the whole world and this makes people feel complacent and I think one of the key issue in the in issues in the conversations about AI is to explain that it's

not about the big robot Rebellion it's more about the AI bureaucrats it will take the world from within and not by rebelling from from outside of from below I mean AI yes it's not a general intelligence but it doesn't need to be within a bureaucracy you need a very kind of narrow intelligence to gain enormous power if you think about a lawyer for instance as an example if you drop a lawyer in the middle of the Savannah he or she are not particularly powerful entities they are much weaker than in a lion or an elephant

or aena but within bureaucracy a lawyer could be more powerful than all the Lions of the world put together right and this is where AI is stepping in we now have millions of AI bureaucrats increasingly making important decisions about us about the world you apply to a bank to get a loan it's an AI deciding you apply for a job in in Wars increasingly it's AI choosing the targets so one part of the conversation is to understand what is the threat and we can explore that the other part of the conversation is of course what

to do about it and here I think I mean almost everybody after a certain amount of time agree that the the best thing would be to Simply slow down give human soci everybody agrees that no not everybody does because of of an argument that I'll get to immediately I mean they will say ideally yes it would be good to slow down because it would give Human Society time to adapt but we can't slow down we can't afford to slow down because then the bad guys are competitors here or across the ocean they will not slow

down and they will win win the race so we must run faster MH and then you have this kind of paradox that basically they are telling us we have to run faster because we can't trust the humans but we think we'll be able to trust the right right exactly and you know you and I had this discussion with Daniel Conan the late Daniel Conan about the decision making of AI versus decision- making of humans I don't know if you remember that but one of the things that's I I think is interesting to explore at the

beginning though is is the historical what what's happened historically with much lesser information systems that humans construct so the the tacid Assumption of the this information age is what we call I think all ages have been information ages in a lot of ways um as you said that more information lead to the truth which will lead to more wisdom more openness A Better World um obviously that's naive and you discuss that and you you define the information instead as something that creates new realities by connecting different points of view into a network um talk a

little bit about that because this concept is standard in mathematics right um but as a philosopher do you see any and historian see any danger in separating information from truth most information is not truth the truth is a very small substance of all information in the world uh the truth is first of all it's it's costly if you want want to write a truthful account of anything you need to research you need to gather evidence to fact check to analyze that that's very costly in terms of time and money and effort uh fiction is very

cheap you just write the first things that comes to your mind the truth is also often very complicated because reality is complicated whereas fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be and and people prefer usually simple stories and finally the truth can be painful whether the truth about us personally my relationships what I've done to other people to myself or entire nations or cultures um whereas fiction you can you can make it as attractive as flattering as you would like it to be so in this competition between truth and and

Fiction and Fantasy truth is at a huge disadvantage if you just flood the world with information which was the point of a lot of people most information will not be the truth and in this ocean of information if you don't give the truth some help some Edge the truth tends to sink to the bottom not rise to the top and we see it again and again throughout history every time people invent a new information so it's really interesting because I was just listening reading um Rachel M's prequel where she talks about Joseph goal's talking about

this like if you flood the Zone with L with bad information or just anything it it washes out the truth and of course teny Williams said the truth is at the bottom of bottomless well you can never get to it um and and it's and someone more modern Steve Bannon if you I read Steve Bannon I'm sorry I do it for the rest of you but he talks about it incessantly the idea of flooding The Zone because that's the best way to confuse and distract people uh into um and it's used everywhere including years ago

in Circuit City which was a was just an Electronics retailer when I walked in there was a bunch of TVs and they were all going and I said why is that doing it and the person goes oh it's the wall of Confusion And I was like what he goes we want you to buy a certain television set so we want to upset and confuse you and then make you wander through a racetrack situation and then you'll buy the TV we want oh which I know right it was brilliant and it was um but as you

said it's not a new thing so we're used to equating new technology with scientific project prog ress this virtuous circle like the case of the printing press and this was a really interesting part of your book so let's go a little bit in history um you noted that when the Gutenberg guten the Press was invented um uh instead of Science and such as cernus is on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spears one of the founding documents of Science of the scientific tradition he wrote the real bestseller of the 15th century was a a treat a

book called The Hammer of witches yeah talk a little about the hammer of witches okay was a bestseller huge bestseller yeah huge bestseller so um basically especially in a place like this in San Francisco in Silicon Valley you talk with people about information they will eventually reach out to history to give you some historical analogies and they will tell you something like the same way that the printing press caused the Scientific Revolution so what we are doing will create a new scientific revolution right and the thing is the printing press did not cause the Scientific

Revolution you have about 200 years from the time that Gutenberg uh brings print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until the flowering of the Scientific Revolution with Newton and lianet and all these people in the middle of the 17th century during these 200 years you have the worst wave of Wars of religion in European history because of the printing again the printing enabled it in in in in in a way I I'll explain in a moment and also the worst wave of Witch Hunt the big European Witch Hunt craze is not

a medieval phenomenon it's a modern phenomenon that was helped Along by the printing press medieval Europeans didn't worry much about about witches they thought they existed but they didn't think they were dangerous right then around the time that Gutenberg comes with the Press you have a small group of people that comes up with this conspiracy theory that witches are not individuals with magical powers that can Brew love potions and help you find lost treasure there is a global conspiracy led by Satan with agents in every town and every village that wants to destroy Humanity so

qanon is what you're talking basically yes I mean there is a direct line it's it's there is a direct line I mean the ideas are coming from there and at first nobody paid it much much attention then there was one one of the people who popularized it was a man called Hinrich Kramer he stouted the do-it-yourself Witch Hunt in the Alps what is today Austria and uh but he was stopped by the church authorities who thought he was crazy and expelled yes and he took Revenge through the printing press he wrote this book the Hummer

of the witches m maleficarum which was again a do-it-yourself manual to how to identify and kill witches M and many of the ideas we still associate today with witches for instance that witches are mostly women that they engage in Wild sexual orgies this came to a large extent from the deranged imagination of hinor Kramer now just to give you a taste of this book there is an entire section in the book about the ability of witches to steal penises from men with all kinds of evidence you know it's all evidence-based I heard from some people

mhm that so for instance he G he brings a story evidence yeah of a man who wakes up one morning to find out that his penis is gone ah and so he suspects the local witch yeah he goes to the house of the local witch right and forces her to bring him back his penis and the witch says okay okay climb this tree and he climbs the tree and at the top of the tree he finds a bird's nest where the witch keeps all the penises she stole from different men and she says okay you

can take your own yeah and the man of course takes the biggest one right and the the witch tells you no no no you can't take this one this belongs to the parish priest oh okay good good for him now you can understand why this book sold a few more copies than copernicus's on on the revolution of the heavens I don't think there's penises in that there yeah and now this is all sounds very very funny yeah but until you realize the consequences right tens of thousands of people were killed in the most horr horrendous

way during the European Witch Hunt craze and to give just one example to to balance the funny story about the penises so in Munich they arrested an entire family the poppenheimer family accusing them of being part of this glob conspiracy of witches and uh it's a father mother of three kids and they start by torturing the 10-year-old boy the youngest of the family and you can still read the protocol of the interrogation in the archives in Munich today and they they torture a 10-year-old boy in unspeakable ways until he incriminates his mother he admits yes

she's a witch she she went to meet Satan she she kills babies she summons hailstorm and they break the whole family and they execute all of them including the 10-year-old boy and um you know this eventually also reaches to America the Salem witch hunts right and this was uh again this was fued it was not caused by of course but it's not that the printing press caused it but the printing press enabled it to spread right uh for the same reason that fake news and conspiracy theories spread today and then the people that create the

printing presses don't take responsibility for it this modern day yeah I've been in that conversation I mean and and the thing is that conversation happened centuries ago right and today you again have millions of Americans basically believing in the same story about a global conspiracy led by Satan right uh uh to destroy civilization right and if you look what what stopped it last time how did we in in the end get to the Scientific Revolution it wasn't the technology of the printing press it was the creation of Institutions that were dedicating to sifting through this

kind of ocean of information and all these stories about wit witches and so forth and uh are developing mechanisms to evaluate reliable informed by the population correct which is very easily fooled right and and and to to to spread not the information people are most likely to buy but the information which is most likely to be true right you know when you when you send a manuscript to a scientific publisher to be published as as as a paper or as a book so uh they want to know not only if is this will will this

sell a lot of books or a lot of of of copies is it true right which you know one of the things that's happened if you fast forward today and I want to ask a couple more historical things because it it happens again and again this this constant uh Narrative of lying essentially that that people people tend to believe um was uh when I I had an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where I I was talking we were talking about um Alex Jones who is one of the greatest purveyors of misinformation a toly heinous character in

our in our modern history and I was like why don't you take him off the platform he's clearly lying and it's not true and these kids weren't Child Actors and they're actually dead and it's damaging to the parents it's damaging Temp and for some reason he switched the conversation to Holocaust Deni when we did this interview and I was like oh what a mistake on your part but fine we'll go to Holocaust Den IR I was like no no let's stay with Alex Jones but he did it and I went along and he started to

talk about uh that Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie and I felt that was the definition of Holocaust and I was like Wow and I let him spin it out which was really interesting um to hear his point of view which was completely ridiculous because I felt that the more Holocaust than are on the platform the more anti-semitism down the river would happen like you could see it happening if these people had access to other people because it's interesting stuff yeah right it's it's much more interesting than the facts and and you know he got

in a lot of trouble for saying that and Etc but it didn't prevent him from continuing to allow them to thrive on the platform until two years later when he decided to kick them off he decided one person was responsible as far as I was concerned for this flood of anti an semitism because he refused to do anything at at the beginning so talk a little bit about from a historical sense how where those because right now it's in the hands of just a few people and they have real problems with history they have real

problems with knowledge Beyond coding yeah I I think the main issue and some for some reason they all have penises but go ahead so they are afraid the witches will steal them that's well no that's just Elon nobody wants your penis on well [Music] um so how how do you go you talk about self-correcting you talk about the importance of self-correcting mechanisms that's what you call it yeah I I think again the key point about all these issues is not whether people are allowed to say these things because here I would tend to actually agree

with zukerberg with Elon Musk with others we should be very careful before we start simply silencing people you cannot say that at all well let me make a point they do silence when they feel like it so you're aware it's a lot ofy I know I know but but I think again when it comes to really censoring the the there is a there is a discussion to to be to be had right the problem is not with people saying all kinds of things the problem is with the platforms deliberately promoting MH particular particular kinds of

things particular kinds of things that spread hate and fear and anger and outrage it's as as as at some point even Elon Musk said it's not freedom of speech it's freedom of of reach no he didn't say it he copied it from someone but go ahead it was said years before he was willing to repeat it sure but the thing is that um people produce an enormous amount of content all the time right and the question is what gets attention what gets spread MH and here the responsibility of somebody who manages a big platform media

information system whether it's a printing shop or whether it's a social media Outlet is to be very careful about what they choose to spread what they choose to promote and if they don't know how to tell the difference between facts and and lies they are in the wrong business I mean this was this is for instance what was built during the Scientific Revolution is exactly these mechanisms right how do we tell the difference between facts and fiction so how do we build those today when this is in the hands of some very troubled people like

with the full control of these things or either uneducated or just they don't know what they're doing actually it's some incompetence some arrogance some narcissism it's in the hands of a very small amount of people who most of whom know better and and it's in the architecture of this stuff to me it's the architecture because when you look at say a Google it's designed for Speed con what you're looking for if you search for whatever um speed context and accuracy like I'm searching for ADL I'm going to get ADL this is an example I always

use that's a utility right it comes to what social networ are Divine for is virality speed and uh engagement engagement which is a different architecture altogether and it always leads the bad Direction so how do you create what should influence are thinking because the government refuses to step in we'll get to that in a minute I first of all it should be clear that the platforms should be liable for the actions of their algorithms not for the content of the users yeah and if somebody posts a hatefield conspiracy online that's the responsibility of that human

being right but then if the Facebook algorithm or the Tik Tok algorithm decides to promote that conspiracy theory to recommend it to autoplay it this is no longer on the user this is the action of the algorithm and this is the main problem and I mean it it's amazing to think about it but one of the first jobs to be automated in the world was not taxi drivers and was not textile workers it was edit s m news editors I mean this used to be one of the most powerful positions in society if you edit

a major news platform and newspaper you're one of the most important people because you shape the public conversation sure and we saw throughout history how much power editors had like during the French Revolution Jean Paul Mara shaped the course of the French Revolution by editing maybe the most important newspaper of Paris of France that in those time L uh Lenin before he was dictator of the Soviet Union his one job basically was editor of a newspaper iscra uh musolini was editor of the newspaper Avanti this is how he rose to fame and then became dictator

of Italy so like the ladder of promotion was like journalist editor dictator and now the job I haven't reached the top one yet but go ahead because the wrong period during the wrong era I mean now the job that was once done by Len and musolini is done by algorithms it's one of the first jobs in the world to be completely automated and the the it's still of course the humans are still in control they give the algorithms the goal and as I guess most people here know the goal given was increase user engagement right

and the algorithms by trial and discovered that the easiest way to increase user engagement is spread outrage and this is what they did and this they should be liable for that again not for the content of the users so so the idea you're talking about is I I the way I boil down was enragement equals engagement you know it that's the way it does because it works Joy also works but it works less well than enragement right um so which is why you get cat videos and qanon right that's you know essentially the two things

but one of the things um so speaking of the hammer of witches actually before we get to that talk a little about what happened you know in the most famous version of propaganda which is still probably Nazi Germany in terms of using the media using imagery using propaganda because I think we use the word misinformation or disinformation when we're really talking about propaganda in the end but it's all part of the of the same kind of of of tool kit because a key difference between dictatorships and democracies is that democracies work on trust and especially

trust in institutions whereas dictatorships work on terror so dictators they don't really need you to believe in a particular theory in a particular version of reality they really need you to disbelieve everything if they can destroy all trust between people then the only system that can still function is a dictatorship so and we see it also today and we thought of course in Nazi German in the Soviet Union I mean there is like in with one hand they try to spread a particular conspiracy theory a particular propaganda but with the other hand they just try

to S distrust and unfortunately both historically and also today this is not the The Preserve say of Nazis or fascists of of the extreme right we see it on on the right and on the left as well it was also uh something very common on the Marxist left mhm that and and we and and and the key idea maybe the most important idea which is common here is the idea that the only reality is power and that all human relations are power struggles this is an idea which is common on both the extreme right and

the extreme left which is corrosive of trust it implies that all human institutions whether it's the media whether it's science whether it's the C they are just cons Elite conspiracies to gain power whenever somebody tells you something the question to ask is not is it the truth the question to ask is whose privileges does it serve it's obviously not the truth because nobody cares about the truth All Humans care only about power so every time somebody says something the only question is who is who is gaining in power by this so speaking speaking of that

in the hammer of witches for example the times the New York Times fact checked over 170 posts recently from Elon Musk who owns a big communications platform now along with the other stuff he should still be doing and not this um on X in a week and he found that almost one-third were false misleading or missing context his posts coincided with harassment campaigns on Election officials so basically he's using the public the it's not a Public Square it's a private Square owned by the world's richest man to to burn people in his own way so

what do you think about that how do you assess social media at the moment in its ability to self-correct why would it if one rich person who has somehow lost the narrative has the ability to do this in so many ways so first let let this is leaving Trump aside let explain what self-correction is yeah I mean when you look at information networks and at institution throughout history so a key difference is whether they have strong or weak self-correcting mechanisms a self-correcting mechanism is something within the institution itself that constantly Works to identify to expose

the mistakes of the institution or of the member of the institution and correct them so um some institutions have only weak uh uh self-correcting mechanisms in dictatorships they are almost non-existent like in Putin's Russia there is no no mechanism to identify and correct Putin's mistakes well there's no mechanism you know just recently when Elon tweeted about assassination of kamla Harris he was like well it was funny to my employees and so I thought it was funny I was which is sort of like your employe have to laugh at what you say it felt like the

same thing so how do you I mean this summer the Supreme Court sidestepped whether social media should or should not away from musk should should not moderate content public opinion is split because of the at least in this country because of the First Amendment they always get mushed in there in a way that's very deceptive I think conservatives think they're doing too much progressives think too little um and proponents of less content moderation often as I said cite the First Amendment but I don't think it's about Free Speech it's about as you said algorithms um

I'm going to read a bit from your book you wrote The Information Network has become so complicated it relies on to such an extent on an opaque algorithmic decisions in intercomp computer entities that has become very difficult for humans to answer even the most basic of political questions why are we fighting each other so talk about the impact of these unfathomable algorithms that are owned by individual people who direct them in some fashion or control them um but there is a big question here whether the danger is the individuals who own them or whether the

danger potentially is the algorithms themselves and I agree that at the present moment moment the people who own the technology uh probably posed a bigger danger but in the long term we have to take into account that this is the first technology in history which can potentially make decisions and invent new ideas by itself right that AIS are agents and not tools and therefore down the road the main problem could be the AIS and not their human creators or the human owners right so that it becomes self what it does what it wants to do

correct yeah and like in the case of the social media algorithms at I mean today they should know better but at least in the beginning the uh uh Executives who gave the algorithms the task of increase user engagement they did not anticipate what will happen and I think that most of them definitely didn't want what what what happened that that that the uh corrosion of trust and the collapse of the public conversation and the destabilization of democracy this was not their plan well they certainly should have anticip it wasn't very hard to figure that out

correct I mean when you I was in a meeting with Facebook when they showed Facebook live and I said oh what what happens when people murder each other on this thing what happens when someone puts a GoPro on their head and does a mass murder what happens when there's bullying suicide and literally the person there was like you're a bummer carouser I was like yeah I am you know like human Humanity has become sometimes a bummer so how do you then self-correct that because because the thrust of your book is about Ai and you say

we're at a critical moment of canonization um that AIS will become full-fledged members of our information Network let me read this section because you're talking about the people are the problem now um but the algorithm itself will be the AI algorith could become the main problem down the road um which makes you scared because they're doing a bad humans are doing a bad job right now but in in in coming years all information networks from armies to religions will gain millions of new AI members which will process data very differently than humans do the new

members will make alien decisions and generate alien ideas that is decisions and ideas that are unlikely to occur to humans which is a plus for for AI for a lot of people the addition of so many alien members is bound to change the shape of armies religions markets and Nations entire political economic and social systems might collapse and new ones will take their place that's why AI should be a matter of utmost urgency even to people who don't care about technology and who think the most important political questions concern the survival of democracy or their

Fair distribution of wealth it that sounds terrifying because people are doing a terrifically bad job right now so talk about you were not an optimist when it comes to AI you know you're saying Mark Zuckerberg and need Master are one thing but boy way did you get a load of this AI kind of thing I mean first of all it's obvious that AI also has enormous positive potential otherwise we would not be developing it right well um there is the money but go ahead yeah no but even the money I mean you need to sell

something I mean it does I mean in many cases people buy it because there is benefit in it otherwise it's difficult to sell it but um the key thing is that humans human societies are extremely adaptable if we give them enough time MH and this is just moving too fast we don't have time to adapt again to these completely new Financial systems armies religions which are which will be created by all these new AI agents you call them alien and not artificial intelligence why is that uh they are alien not in the sense of coming

from outter space of course they although I can't wait till they get here and fix everything but go ahead about now guys get down here it's because you know artificial intelligence conveys I think again a complacent and wrong idea that these things are artifacts and people when they think of artifacts they think we create them so we can control them we can anticipate them and the most important characteristic of AI is that you cannot really anticipate it because it learns and changes by itself self if a machine cannot learn and change by itself it is

not an AI it is an automatic machine if you think about you know a washing machine a coffee machine you have lots of automatic machines which are not AI it's only AI if it can learn and change by itself which means that it's going to be very difficult to anticipate and to control what it's going to do even though it's fueled by our own information that we've been uploading the past two decades correct yes I mean it works I mean it eats all the information that humans have produced not just in the last two decades

in the last tens of thousands of years if you think about AI that produce images so we feed them with all the images created since the cave art of 40 and 50,000 years ago and they eat the whole of it within just a few months and then start creating new things the at the first kind of generation it's more ly similar to what humans have produced so far but I guess that very quickly they will start to become more and more creative which also means more and more alien more and more different from Human Creations

now we have been used to living you know throughout history inside human culture like everything all the images all the Poetry all the financial systems all the armies they all came ultimately from the human imagination from our mind and suddenly very quickly we will find ourselves living inside a culture which is more and more an alien culture coming out of the calculations and confabulations and imaginations of a nonorganic entity which was originally fed by us which was originally fed by us the same way that we originally we eat the plants and we eat animals and

still we can create things that plants and animals can't it's you go back 3 billion years or whatever so you have these the atmosphere of the Earth had almost no oxygen in it then you had these microorganisms that uh uh polluted the atmosphere with oxygen and this destroyed this killed almost all the organisms in the world a few of them adapted to the oxygen and we are their descendants um but eating all this oxygen we can still do stuff that these microorganisms from 3 billion years ago couldn't anticipate and and can't understand why do you

assume it's it wants to kill you know the idea is doesn't want one of the things it does what it does what it does what it does so we don't know what it'll do so again to take something you know think about the financial system the financial system is a good example because it is the ideal playground for ai ai have a still a big difficulty with a messy physical biological world this is why every year you have these promises that next year you have all the the self driving cars on the road and it's

it turned out to be much more difficult because you have to deal with traffic and humans and and and broken roads and dogs and whatever so it's difficult the financial system is easy the financial system is only data it's data in and data out that's it so this is kind of AI this is their ideal playground right what happens if you give AIS more and more power to make decisions and also invent new stuff in the financial that we hadn't thought of right exactly one of the tool the things that which is really interesting is

that tech people are using a term agent co-pilot friend assistant like they're lesser than essentially than humans and we are completely in charge I just recently spoke with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suliman and they they have a new word at my Microsoft called agentic which is Agent which agent it's not a word I don't care I think it's a new word they invented okay fine but it's not um you know and you're ringing the bell talk about what you think between the thinking of AI as a tooler agent because that's what they're leaning in on

this is here to we're here to help you and it reminds me of the which I always say the Twilight Zone episode to serve man it's a cookbook right like that when they came I don't know if you ever saw it but you should um it's a cookbook uh it's not here to serve man it's a serve man with a side of uh potatoes I guess um when you talk about this idea of agentic you're talking about something very different because um because they're using uh companion friend everything teacher aent is an entity that can

make decisions by itself that you can't anticipate and that can invent new ideas by itself that you can't anticipate that can learn and change so they had for instance this famous experiment that open AI did when they wanted to test gp4 before releasing it and they gave it the uh task of solving capture puzzles and it couldn't solve the capture puzzles all these kind of strings of Twisted words you need you need to identify so they gave it access to the task rabbit uh uh online uh web page where you can hire people to do

things for you and gp4 try to hire a human to solve the Capa for it makes sense interesting thing was the human got suspicious the human worker on task rabbit wrote why do you need help solving capture are you a robot it ask the it directly asked are you a robot wow humans for the wind that's rabit uh but what happened then is the gp4 answered no I am not a robot I have a vision impairment which is why I can't solve the Capa and I need your help and the human I mean was this

sounds reasonable and the human did it right now nobody told gp4 to lie and nobody told gp4 what lie would be most effective this was a very effective Lie from if it was just you know this glorified autocomplete let's just take a word from here and a word from there you you wouldn't come up with such an effective lie right so it's a good Li so this is an agent right and you know you you scale up and I I I'll give an example from what's happening in my home country now in Israel so um

there is a huge debate I'm not sure who is correct there about the role of AI in choosing bombing Targets in Gaza MH like choosing you know in The Terminator you had the robots pulling the trigger right but what's really happening in Wars today it's the humans pulling the trigger but the AIS are calling the shots literally calling the shots I mean everybody that I talked with agree that at present the AI has the capability of choosing targets right and that it is being used to go over immense amounts of data that no human analyst

is able to analyze and choose targets so so is when you CU let let me read you what sulaman said they use the word friend they use the word companion they're using these very lovely words for I guess the lonely Humanity but um and friend is doing a lot of heavy lifting here he said it's going to this is what he said to me it's going to be your teacher your medical advisor your support network ultimately it's going to take actions on your behalf this is the friendly version of that you're talking about a very

unfriendly Target selector right now again there is a debate and I I don't know who is right because I talked with a lot of people and they they tell you different things and I I I read different reports and documents one school of thought says that the AI goes over again enormous amount of data that no human can analyze this and and based on patterns in the data mhm says that a particular building let's say it's Hamas headquarters and tell says to the humans bomb this building and the humans just go ahead and and bom

it right on on basically on the advice or orders of the AI the other school of thought I've been talking to that says no it's not how it happens the AI says this building is a Hamas head headquarter bomit and then we get the human analysts to go again over all the idea whether it's Radiology or that can itate into anything yes and but they all agree that the AI is key because the humans would never even think of looking at that building without the the AI pointing at it although you're talking and this is

still extremely primitive AI right I mean this kind of bombing Ai and C GPT and gp4 this is like the anas of the AI world right which is what they talk about was but but where does human where do humans intercede because a lot of them argue to me for example if you said to AI solve human hunger right solve hunger around the world the first thing it does you know the first answer without the correct prompts is we kill half the human race that'll work and that's what it will do that was because it

makes sense like that's what you should do not find new crops find new which it could also do so doesn't it really depend one of the things you had let me read this um an AI agent in your phone has implic on a personal level as you know it's all in your phone your new Apple intelligence or whatever it's called right now it just tries to rewrite emails for you but um which is irritating because most of my emails are no and yes and then it asks me if they they want me to rewrite that

which is no I don't um you write the easiest way for AI to seize power is not by breaking out the Dr Frankenstein's lab but by in grating itself with some paranoid tiberious dictator yeah I can think of one or two these days um what risk do you see talk about that because you're talking about talk about we tend to talk about AIS in the context of democracies mhm but dictatorships also have a huge problem with with AIS uh for dictators for human dictators the scariest thing in the world is not a democratic Revolution the

scariest thing is a powerful subordinate that takes power from them either assassinates them or manipulates them if you think about the Roman Empire for instance this is the reference to tiberias not a single Roman Emperor was ever toppled by a democratic Revolution but a very large percentage of them were either killed or toppled or manipulated by powerful subordinates a general a provincial Governor their wife their son somebody right and this is still the number one problem for dictators around the world and for them to give a lot of power to an AI that can get

then get out of their control is very very tricky because you know to to to seize power in a democracy it's difficult because power is distributed between many organization institutions how would the AI deal with the Senate phillybuster it's difficult but to seize power in a dictatorship you just need to learn how to manipulate a single very par individual MH and paranoid people are usually the easiest to manipulate M so if you think again I know a few yeah so uh it's not just an issue for democracies also dictatorships have H uh problems and you

know it starts with small things like if you release a a a chatbot to the Russian internet how can Putin make sure that the chatbot will not tell jokes about him or criticize the invasion of Ukraine or say call it a war God forbid because in Russia there is a law that this is not a war this is a special military operation and if somebody says that this is a war they go to jail now what do you do with chatbots I mean how do you terrorize a chatbot like even if you prepare a perfectly

kind of the the regime prepares its own chatbot and releases it to the Russian internet but then the chatbot starts interacting with people starts analyzing data starts learning and changing if the how can you prevent the chatbot from starting to say things against the regime so it's not good for dictatorships but democracy it also creates chaos um one of the selling points of the internet and social media was that it brought the world closer together that was at the beginning just so you're aware um yes we're all going to get along if I had a

dollar for every time Mark zuer said Community to me I'd be very wealthy but somehow it didn't turn out that way um there's you say right now diverging views on social media are actually leading to more separation will get worse with AI talk about this you called it the Silicon curtain and data colonialism so this is about what might happen on the international level not within countries but with between countries so the two main scenarios is uh that you'll have the world splitting into completely different information spheres after centuries of convergence and globalization you will

have completely you know if the main metaphor in the early days of the web was the web that connects everything and community and la la la so now the main metaphor is the cocon like the web is closing in on us and we are enclosed within information cocoons and different people are inside different cocoons and the Silicon curtain is of course a reference to the Iron Curtain and to the idea that we will have entire countries or entire spheres which are in completely separate information which we have in this country right now which is which

is which is developing at a very fast rate um and then a complete breakdown in communication and understanding between human beings that you cannot agree on on there is no longer a shared human reality mhm and uh the other main danger is of the rise of new digital Empires and data colonialism the same thing that happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution the few countries that industrialized first they had then the power to conquer and dominate and exploit the rest of the world this can happen again with AI technology but it doesn't have

to be countries it can be people right it can be people inside the country but I mean I think the biggest worry is still on the international level you know some countries will become fabulously wealthy because of AI and the US is and China are are are the the the Front Runners here but other countries could completely collapse uh their economy could completely collapse and they will not have the resources to re re the work force to rebuild to to to adapt to the new AI economy so we can have a repeat of the Imperial

uh uh imperialist Drive of the 19th century and this time uh centered around data to control a country from afar you will no longer need to send in the soldiers and gunboats and then machine guns you will basically just need to take out the data right if you have all the data of a country you have all the data of every journalist every politician every military officer and you also control the attention of the people in that country you control what they see what they he you don't need to send in the soldier right this

has become a data Colony so before we go I want to we're going to get to questions in just a second I want to talk about regulation you've been advocating for AI regulation for a while so have I um last year you signed the open letter causing for a pause which very nice but it didn't happen just FYI nobody really expected it no it did not and they you know open a is Raising $150 billion uh I sorry a valuation of 150 billion they're raising 6 billion um lots of people and signed it um and

then started their own their own thing uh for I think of one two people you didn't um here in California Gavin news recently vetoed a bill that would have been the first legislation of the nation to put up AI guard rails it was a problematic bill it was it was somewhat unspecific but it required safety testing it man data to kill switch turn off AI systems um and and many who criticize it said it was focused too much on Frontier models um and then Stanford Professor f f Lee who was one of the early AI

people also warned that we disadvantage smaller developers and they're trying to rewrite it but there's almost no uh regulation anywhere and there's no Global regulation uh there's some of banning Bots deep fakes people are talking about um how do you how do you what do you see as the regulatory scheme workk here to do this cuz it Doesn't we haven't been able to do the last one yeah not one so I think that there are three things I can say I mean there are two regulations which should be obvious one is that corporations should be

liable for the actions of their algorithms you developed it you deployed it you're liable like with cars like with medicines like I agree I the other is that AI you should you should ban counterfeit humans mhm AIS and Bots are welcome to interact with us only if they identify as AIS so transparency yes right but I mean it's going to be impossible to just regulate AI in advance because again it's an agent because it learns and changes very very rapidly the only thing that can work is to create living institutions not kind of dead regulations

that are written in in in in books but living institutions staffed by at least some of the bank Talent on the planet and with enough budget to understand what is happening and to react on the Fly and again before we even get to regulation the first step is observation we need eyes before teeth like most people even in this country are hardly understand what is happening and why is is it dangerous if you go to the rest of the world to the countries which might end up as data colonies they are even in a worse

situation because they have to rely on what the American or the Chinese companies or governments tell them MH so what we need urgently is an international institution uh again with the best talent and with enough budget to Simply tell people what is happening and what are the dangers and now we can discuss what regulations nuclear Regulatory Commission is kind of what you're talking about right like but again with nukes it was relatively easy to understand the danger right with AI it's a very very rapidly develop positives to it the Surgeon General talked about this there's

never been technology that's both positive and possibly devastating to humanity so my last two questions um you say also that unsupervised uh algorithms should be banned from curating public debates yeah absolutely um people do such a good job at it already um I still I would trust the the humans more than the we have thousands of years of experience uh with humans we don't have experience with AIS I mean in the tech work I often hear the opposite argument we have thousands of years of experience these humans we know we can't trust them the AIS

we don't know so maybe they'll be good yeah and that's a a huge huge gamble yeah yeah so I want to finish on this you you write um you said the um the survival of democracies depends on their ability to regulate the information Market which we have not done at all like at all yeah not one I was just recently on a CNN debate with and this gu who was a trump spokesperson spokes model really because he didn't know anything um he said I said how many law laws are regulating uh the internet and Free

Speech because he was going on about free speech and he goes hundreds and I said zero but you're close you know um so so you note the decisions we make in the coming years will determine whether summoning this alien intelligence proves to be a terminal error or the beginning of a hopeful new chapter of the evolution of life you have it both ways there I see so before we go what's your worst case scenario and what's your best case scenario you know the the the the worst case scenario is that AI destroys not just human

civilization but you know the the very light of Consciousness that AI are highly intelligent but they are non-conscious entities at least so far right and we could have a scenario that they take over the the nonorganic highly intelligent entities take over the planet even spread from this planet to to to the rest of the Galaxy but it's a completely dark universe that Consciousness I mean the ability to feel things like love and hate and pain and pleasure this could be completely gone so this is like it's not a very high probability but it's there is

some probity we'll call that the Thanos version but go ahead yeah okay and that's the wor case scenario okay what's the best one the best case scenario is that we are able to harness the immense positive potential of AI you know in health care in solving climate change in education and the key is knowing which problems to solve one of the key problems of humanity throughout history and you see it in particular in in Silicon Valley is that we rush to solve problems we do a tremendous job and then we realize we solved the wrong

problem because we did not spend enough time on just understanding what the problem is and you know we now have this fabulous technology to say unimportant things to people we don't care about and we still don't have we still don't know how to say the most important things to the people we most love we most care about so we I mean it happens again and again in history right that and we are so wise when it comes to you know finding the Technical Solutions but we just don't spend enough time on choosing the right problems

to solve right absolutely you don't use emojis then I guess um you ever heard of gen emojis of what gen emojis h no this is an apple thing you can generate any Emoji you want oh so like a face anything you just describe it and the Emojis generated all right we're going to get to questions from the audience um uh think about your gen Emoji what you want to make and waste your time doing that well the machines take over and kill us I guess that's where we're going on um are you a positive person

or a negative person would you say I try to be a realist right well you're a historian as a historian historian yeah as a historian are you are you positive or negative you know I'm I I I I know a lot of terrible things that humans have done yeah but I also am familiar with a lot of very good things that humans have done I mean we've managed to shift from a situation when we can only trust say 50 other people in the band like this small Hunter gather band uh to a situation when you

we can now trust to some extent hundreds of millions and even of billions of people in a country or all over the world I mean the food we eat almost all of it is grown and produced by complete strangers on the other side of the world yeah so this is really remarkable yeah uh so it's not only bad news again in this discussion who should you trust more the AIS or the humans I think yes we have thousands of years of experience with humans and we've actually made some significant progress m in building trust between

humans so this is why I I I think we we are still better gamble on the humans and not on the AI okay all right so questions from the audience we talk about a couple of them where's the all right where's put I guess you put your hand out is that correct are you guys where's the people with the hello we have a question from the balcony on your right okay it's hard to see but go ahead hi thanks for coming um I uh really enjoyed sapiens and there was one particular part that gave me

pause um if I could read it it's a you say cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche in fact it is a vital asset had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values it probably would have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture so um I agreed with almost everything in sapiens and this one idea just completely flabbergasted me it's the exact opposite of what I believe and I was wondering this was written a while ago I was wondering if the political experience especially in in this country has

if you've um updated your opinion or if you could elaborate great question so just to to explain the idea the idea that the reality is so complicated that to come up with a theory a model that just explains everything in a perfect way is impossible for humans so if you look at any culture if you look at any ideology any religion there are always these contradictions inside them and um if we could not to some extent live with the contradictions we could not have cultures and ideologies and religions and financial systems and states and and

so forth uh the question is what do we do with them and I think the the the the positive side is to acknowledge these contradictions and use them as fuel to to to think further to explore further uh the what is really dangerous I find is the kind of fanaticism that sees only half of reality or only half of of uh uh you know you shut down half your brain or or or one eye and you just don't acknowledge part of reality because of the inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance and this usually leads

to the greatest crimes in history it's not a matter of you know it could be secular ideologies like communism it could be religious ideologies is if you have some kind if you're comfortable with exploring the the cognitive dissonance I think uh you you'll be okay but if you go in the kind of fanatical directional just have this one idea one key unlocks all the all the problems in the world this this tends to be the most dangerous okay next question I don't um this question is all the way to your right in the orchestra okay

right here go I see you hello um I have a question so you talked a lot about uh technology companies regulation uh specific people uh could you talk a little bit more about the individual responsibility so uh the analogy that I have in my mind so information is like food it's very easy for people who are AES who drive the car every day get the bad food to blame the government blame the regulations uh you know the quality of the food while the answer there is of course in regulation but there is something that individuals

have to do to complement that and in the public discourse there is not so much information about what we as individuals need to uh how do we leave with this uh going forward thank you yeah the only can I say there are no regulations so it's not we're we're either getting tainted meat or not and so in life you don't that doesn't happen that's just one thing is we don't we don't get signals not enough I mean first of again the number one responsibility is not on the individuals I mean these are extremely powerful and

complex systems and we shouldn't play it's like with climate change that yes each individual should do their part but ultimately it's a trick by the big corporations to kind of shift the blame and do a kind of of of of guilt game oh you everybody's guilty and you go home and feel guilty for what you did and leave us out of it so the the number one responsibility is first on the government and on the big corporations but of course individuals have the responsibility at least in their own life and I really like the analogy

uh uh is food and I basically yeah agree that everybody should go on an information diet that the same way that with food you know a century ago food was scarce people would eat whatever they could get and uh especially if lots of sugar and fat in it that's good lots of energy now food in many places around the world is super abundant you have all this industrially produced junk food which is deliberately pumped full of fat and sugar and salt to make it addictive Ive and people have under at least many of us have

understood this is not good for us and we need an information diet and we need a food diet and it's the same with information once it was scarce we consumed anything we could get the only book in in in in the village now it's super abundant you have all this junk information around uh so the idea that more information is always good for you this is nonsense we need time to digest information and we need time also to detoxify the Mind from all the junk information that we put in there it's also addictive and necessary

it's two things at once it's it's designed to be addictive by the people who designed it and the algorithms and then it's also you can't live without it because you can't do your job so you can't put it down ever yeah again I'm not saying completely cut yourself off right but each person in their life uh should think about what is my information diet and how could I improve it both in terms of quantity and for most people it means consuming less information and again consuming less information and going on an information fast every now

and then means I have more time to digest and to detoxify the information I already consumed and also be more mindful about the type of information that you put inside your mind right so absolutely okay time for I think two more questions where is the person uh this next question comes from the balcony in the center okay all right right there I see you thank you I read about the vacillation in capabilities between platform AIS and individually controlled AIS that might even run on um a gaming computer say what's that going to look like moving

forward if individuals or affiliation groups can control their own agents and what are the implications will it just amplify their Tribble they'll they'll incentivize it to say give me qanon or will they and what would it look like to say give me the truth MH well I mean with regard to give me the truth the expectation that AI will give us the truth is is unlikely to be realized again because most information is not is not the truth AI is simply likely to create it it won't tell us the truth about this world it will

create a new and much more complicated and much more difficult to understand world and again um I know that immigration is on it's on the mind of a lot of people in the United States and other countries around the world today and people are worried we'll have all these immigrants in and they will take some of the jobs and they will have all these kind of different ideas about how to do things how how can we manage how can Society manage so whatever you think about human immigration this is a good model to think about

the AI Revolution what we are talking about is the immigration of millions and maybe billions of Agents into society taking up a lot of jobs and they will not necessarily start with again that the taxi drivers they may start with the editors and the bankers and the scen writers and the producers that's exactly where they're they will take the the the kind of most important jobs first or the generals in the Army and they will have different ideas about how to manage society and and some of them could become your friends one thing we haven't

discussed is this uh uh new abilities of AIS to fake intimacy yeah with people I mean if previously the big issue with social media was the battle for attention you had these algorithm very capable in grabbing human attention the new generation of AIS they can go far beyond attention they can go to intimacy for the first time in history it would be possible to create Mass intimacy which is a contradictory idea which was never possible before you know like Hitler's propaganda machine it was good at attention you could force every German family to listen on

the radio to the speech by the great leader but this did not create intimacy now with the new generation of AI you could have you could Mass produce intimacy so maybe some of your best friends will be AIS and they will influence the way you think and uh again before we even get to the discussion optimism pessimism is it good is it bad it's just radically different from anything we we have to understand what it could do okay um one more question I'd like it to be woman please three guys that's enough I have three

sons love them but I love my daughter too so let's have a woman this question is all the way in the back middle of the orchestra okay as long as it's a lady I'm sorry I'm a man oh no no I'm sorry I I don't mean to be rude but we only have a few minutes apologies where I I apologize I'm just going to overrule you so that's okay okay over here wherever you can find whoever's doing the picking is going to have to talk to afterwards okay thank you again I have three sons love

them but it's time for my daughter go wow thank you um okay I wrote this down because I'm a little shy about this um would you agree that Europe has a lower tolerance for fake news and holds media professional to a higher standard than the US who is often criticized for the systemic spread of misinformation if so how do you think we can hold the media accountable in combat misinformation should there be rules that prevent certain news outlets from labeling themselves as news if they don't adhere to specific standards M shouldn't there be requirements such

as you're not allowed to tell more than 5% of verified BS well that would be great yeah so definitely I mean part of what is happening is the Erasure of borders uh between you know the private space and public space people don't know if what they say they are setting in in private or in public similarly the Erasure of the border between news and entertainment and you know if you want to be a news channel you have to live up to C certain standards and if you don't want to then just Define yourself as entertainment

but as long as people understand what they are consuming and and we don't have that uh with regard to Europe and the US it's not my expertise I'm not sure uh but I would say that you know I hear a lot of people say that Europe has too many regulations and this is bad for business this is bad for the development of the technology so what's how would it help you if you have all the regulations but all the companies are elsewhere so we are self-destructing this is what the the the they often tell to

the Europeans and I think this is this is inaccurate because regulation and safety is not bad for business you know if you want to put a car on the road people want a safe car if you have a a good safety regulations this is not bad for the business of of car production if you think about you know the the the covid and the vaccines so if you have a choice between a Russian vaccine and a German vaccine most people would go for the German vaccine right because there are a lot more regulations that you

can trust in Germany about how you produce uh uh vaccines and medicines and so forth and in Russia so in many areas this kind of binary choice you have to choose either you have regulations or you have an economy this is just not true it is absolutely right 100 but they that's one of the biggest tropes of Silicon Valley and with regards to media media actually has regulations attached to it they get sued look at what happened to FOX and smartmatic they do there is a price and the problem is there's no price I'm going

to ask the last question I'm sorry we've got to go they're telling me we have to go but I have one more question so with sapiens you became like every Tech bro was a fanboy of you like crazy I I was like have you talked to you all do you know what you've all said I'm like no I took an anthropology course in college unlike you so I did know a lot of this stuff um uh so but they were thrilled and you really did find a way to get them relative ly educated not very

um about some stuff so they loved you loved you loved you like couldn't stop talking about you know that right um they were your biggest Fanboys this is critical yeah what are they saying about they don't like me anymore they never did but uh what do they how do out we'll wait and see what do you think what I I think they will like it less than sapiens but but but again I think maybe I'm less critical than you are of them but I I think many of them not all of you met them yet

but go ahead I've met some of them and many of them are really deeply concerned about it they are because they I mean they understand almost better than anybody else what they are creating and they are very concerned they don't know how to stop again they have this basic argument that we would most of them not all of them we would like to slow down we realize it's dangerous we would like to give Human Society more time more time to think about it more time to develop the safety mechanisms but we can't stop we can't

slow down they will say we are the good guys if we slow down the bad guys on in the other company or in the other country will not slow down and then the bad guys will win the race and take over the world so we must do it first right but that's sort of the X orme argument that Mark Zuckerberg's often made like it's either X or us and I'm like is that my choice is there another is there choice I mean I think there I think there are more choices but I also think this

is a serious argument and again I don't think they are kind of Hollywood science fiction villains just Dr Evil out to take over the world so um I think that they they would appreciate uh to some extent a a deep and meaningful conversation about it they have their opinions but I I wouldn't write them off so so quickly and so easily all right on that note youve all her right it's a great book Thank you thank you thanks you great thank you