Stupidity: A powerful force in human history

why do we have this tendency to eat so much food that isn't really good for us but actually history provides an answer humans can cooperate on the level of millions how do we do that by inventing and believing fictional stories for me the point about writing history is not to remember the past it's to understand what is happening to us right [Music] now when I was a kid I often woke up in the middle of the night if afraid that there is a monster under the bed this is actually a historical memory from hundreds of

thousands of years ago when humans lived in the wild in the savannah and there were actually monsters that came to eat children in the middle of the night a cheetah would come or a lion would come and if you wake up in fear and call your mom you could be saved to understand our eating habits we also need to know history why do we have this tendency to eat so much food that isn't really good for us but actually history provides an answer tens of thousands of years ago when we lived in the African Savannah

and we came across something very sweet like a tree full of ripened fruit it made perfect sense it was good for the body to eat as many sweets as quickly as possible because if you ate just one or two fruits and went away and came back the next day it would be empty like the baboons next door came in the middle of the night and ate everything so the right thing to do was to eat as many sweets as quickly as possible now today we live in a completely different world we open the refrigerator there

is this huge chocolate cake inside and we can wait but our body still thinks that we are in the African Savannah now that we understand that history is happened and we are no longer in the savannah we can make better decisions but to do that we first of all need to understand the history of humanity and how we got here when I was a kid I I asked these big questions about life I mean what are we doing here what is this all about and I think what what struck me the most is not that

the adults often had no answers is that they were not concerned about the fact that they really don't understand the world they would be concerned about all these kind of you know the latest thing in the news or the mortgage or or or the bank problems but the fact that they don't understand life uh didn't seem to bother them and in a way I wrote Unstoppable us to answer or try to answer at least some of the questions that really bothered me when when I was 10 or 12 when you write about complicated stuff and

you are actually not sure what you want to say you don't really understand understand the subject deeply enough then with adults you can just cover yourself by talking with these very long complicated sentences and big unintelligible jargon complicated words and people assume they don't understand you not because you don't know what you're talking about but because they don't they're not smart enough to understand with kid it doesn't work if you start writing these very long complicated sentences with with big words they just close the book so you need to speak very clearly and for that

you really need to think deeply to know what do you actually want to say the ability to believe in fiction is really the superpower of humanity this is why we control the world if you look at any major human achievement it is always based on large scale cooporation you want to build pyramids you want to fly to the moon you want to create an atom bomb you want to build a healthc care system it's never the work of a single genius or of like a group of 10 friends you always need thousands and millions of

people cooperating together and we are the only mammals that can do that chimpanzees can cooperate on the level of say 50 chimpanzees or a Hara chimpanzees can work together to a common goal humans can cooperate on the level of Millions how do we do that by inventing and believing fictional stories it's most obvious in the case of religions you can get millions of people to cooperate on a common project whether it's building a cathedral or a hospital or fighting a holy war by telling them a fictional story you can't do that with chimps you can

never convince a group of chimps to cooperate by promising to them that if you do this after you die you go to chimpanzee heaven and there you receive lots of bananas and coconuts so so now do this no chimpanzee will ever believe such a story We Believe such stories so we rule the world but it's not just religions religions are the most obvious example it's the same if you look at economic uh uh activities uh money and corporations just like gods and demons and angels are a fictional story we created if you think what is

a corporation um so a corporation exists only in our imagination what is Google or Facebook or McDonald's or or Disney the same way that ancient people had shamans that made these big ceremonies and convinced everybody to believe in the existence of some ghost or spirit so we have our own shamans called lawyers who also make these very complicated ceremonies speaking in languages that nobody understands and convince every everybody to start believing in the great spirit of Google or in the great spirit of McDonald's it's more important than ever to focus on our shared human identity

because the big challenges we face can only be solved through Global cooperation you think for instance about climate change and uh the threat of ecological collapse this is not something that can be solved on the level of a single country even the most powerful countries cannot do it by themselves they need to cooperate similarly if we want to uh uh regulate the explosive power of artificial intelligence it cannot be done on the level of a single country and in order to have effective cooperation on a global level we need to appreciate what is common to

humans [Music] everywhere humans unfortunately are you know we are very smart but this spite our wisdom we keep doing some very stupid things one of the most powerful forces in history actually is human stupidity we know that nuclear weapons could destroy the whole of human civilization we know that now artificial intelligence can escape our control and yet we keep on producing it this is the kind of basic tension in in human history that at the same time you find incredible uh wisdom and the the the worst types of delusion and stupidity are are feeding each

other if we these kind of perfectly wise entities then yes we could create the most powerful weapons but we would never misuse them if we were just stupid then we we wouldn't we wouldn't be so powerful the combination is what makes the situation so dangerous the three I think biggest challenges that face humankind today in 21st century are ecological collapse um disruptive Technologies like artificial intelligence and the threat of global war and nuclear war the one thing everybody needs to know about AI is that it's the first technology in history that can make decisions by

itself and can create new ideas by itself it's often compared to previous technological breakthrough like the printing press or the atom bomb it's completely different printing presses could not decide what book to print atom bombs could not decide by themselves which cities to destroy if you take all the printing presses in the world together they cannot come up with a single new sentence by themselves an atom bomb cannot invent a new and even more powerful weapon it's not an artifact that we are creating it actually should stand for alien intelligence it's a new type of

intelligent entity that uh acts increasingly independently of H human thought and human vition so we are bringing into our ecosystem into our planet a very powerful and alien type of intelligence that we don't know how to control and this is extremely [Music] dangerous until a few years ago we were in a time of order the world of the early 21st century was the most olderly and peaceful that it ever was so for most of History the average expenditure of a government on its military was about 50% of the budget in the early 21st century it

went down to 7% average worldwide whereas expenditure on healthc care Rose to 10% it was the first time in history that governments all over the world spent more money on Healthcare than on the military then things began to change in the second decade of the 21st century uh the global order which was based on common values and and interests was attacked from from all sides and we are now in the third decade of the 21st century seeing a sharp rise in the incidents of Wars all over the world defense budgets military budgets all over the

world Skyrocket money increasingly goes to tanks and Cal weapons instead of to nurses and teachers and this continues uh uh uh to spread there could it could be even be that we are already in the midst of the third world war and we just haven't realized it yet uh very often in history we understand the meaning of events only in hindsight uh today if you write in a History exam when did the second world war start any kid in school knows that the answer is the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland but if

you ask people let's say in May 1941 in New York or in Moscow or in Hiroshima they would not tell you that they are living in the midst of the second world war yes there is some war in Europe there are some conflicts in Asia but this is not the second world war so it could be that the third world war already began on the 24th of February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and we still haven't understood it yet the main message of the book and also in the title Unstoppable us is that humans all

humans are the most powerful entity on the planet and we should own it we should acknowledge our immense power because only then we can also take responsibility for what we are doing with this power my name is yal no Harari and this is my brief but spectacular take on what it means to be human [Music]