Transcript of Human Dignity in the Age of AI: Yuval Noah Harari

We’ll be able to make decisions about our lives. We’ll be able to invent new everything from medicines to weapons.

And that’s the biggest challenge.

Evolution of Thinking on AI

KOHEI ITOH: You just said that maybe in a few years, but as early as 2015, you published a book, History of Tomorrow or Future. There you also warned and actually concentrated on information technology information networks. How is your thought right now compared to your thought, let’s say 2015, when you wrote Homo Deus? It’s been ten years.

You started as a historian and medieval military expert. And now you’re focusing on information networks and AI. Could you compare your development in past ten years?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes. I think ten years ago when I wrote Homo Deus, all these talk—I mean very few people were talking about AI at the time.

You had some people in the computer science department. You had people in the leading corporations like Google and Microsoft who already understood what was happening. And you had a few philosophers like Nick Bostrom, who published Superintelligence in 2014. But when I wrote Homo Deus, it felt like, oh, we are talking about something that maybe will happen in hundreds of years, some philosophical speculations with very little immediate practical implications for our lives. Now it’s all around us and the pace of development is simply astounding.

Already back then there were people like Ray Kurzweil also who said that there will be AGI, artificial general intelligence, able to surpass human beings in all fields, not just a narrow field like playing chess or driving a car, but in all fields, they say by the end of the 2020s, by 2029. And even to me when I read what Ray Kurzweil wrote, I thought, he’s exaggerating. It can’t be by 2029. Now Ray Kurzweil is still saying 2029 and he’s considered one of the more conservative thinkers. Like you listen to the people who lead the development effort in corporations in The U.S, in China, they were talking within a year, within five years we’ll have AGI. So it sped up dramatically.

The other thing is that all hopes of regulating this, of reaching some kind of agreement about this seem now extremely naive. Certainly since the last U.S. Elections, I think really all hope of reaching a global agreement on how to manage the risk of AI development is gone.

The Paradox of Trust

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: The big paradox of the AI revolution, I think at the heart of the AI revolution, there is a big paradox and it’s a paradox of trust. When you talk with the people who lead the AI revolution, the people who run companies like OpenAI, like Microsoft, like Tencent, like Baidu, when you talk with the leading politicians, I ask them two questions always.

The first question I ask is why are you moving so fast? Okay, yes, I understand there is enormous positive potential but there are also risks. Let’s slow down a little to give human society the time. Humans are extremely adaptive creatures. We can adapt to the AI age, but we just need time. Just give us a bit more time. And they all say the same thing.

We understand there are huge risks as big as human extinction. We understand this. We would like to slow down, but we can’t because if we slow down and our competitors in the other company, in the other country, they don’t slow down, they will win the race and the most ruthless people will then dominate the world because they will have this wonderful technology AI. So because we cannot trust the other humans, we must move faster.

And then I ask the second question, do you think you could trust the super intelligent AIs you are developing? And they say, yes. The same people who like a minute ago told me we cannot trust the other humans, suddenly they become extremely trustworthy and they say, but we would be able to trust the AIs. And this is really on the border of insanity because with humans, I understand why it’s difficult to trust the other humans. But we have thousands of years of experience with other human beings. We understand their psychology, their motivation.

We know a lot about the human craving for power, but we also understand the mechanisms to check the pursuit of power. And over thousands of years, humans have developed ways to learn to trust each other. And 10,000 years ago or one hundred thousand years ago, humans lived in tiny bands of a few dozen individuals couldn’t trust anybody outside their band. Now you have nations like Japan with hundreds of millions of citizens that can trust each other. The global trade network connects all 8 billion people on the planet.

The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the medicine that protect us is often produced by strangers on the other side of the planet. So yes, there’s still a huge problem how to trust other people, but we have experience in doing that. We have zero experience with super intelligent AIs. We have no idea what kind of goals and tricks they might develop. We have no idea what happens when you have millions and millions of super intelligent AI’s interacting with each other and with millions of human beings.

AI is not one single big computer somewhere. It’s going to be, think about it as a wave of immigration sweeping over the entire world. You now have all these populist parties that are so afraid of immigrants. Oh, the immigrants will come. The immigrants will take our jobs. The immigrants have different ideas about culture. They will take over our country. They will change our culture. We are so afraid. AI is a wave of millions of alien immigrants that will take people’s jobs that have very different ideas about how to run societies that could take over countries.

This should frighten people much more. And so this is the big paradox. And the big question is how do you build trust between humans before we develop super intelligent AI.

Elites and the Division in Society

KOHEI ITOH: You talk about trust between human and let’s say autonomous AI or AI agents, but also the trust between so called elite and so called normal citizen, division is widening. And of course, the populist and also dictator you mentioned in Nexus that they try to take advantage of AI as an agent, not as an agent, but as a tool right now. But then consequence is going to be unknown because as you mentioned.

So how do you see the trust between or division between so called elite and sort of populist kind of generation? Because books are probably read mostly by so called elite side. But I’m wondering how much this book is influencing general public because that’s what we need. You’re trying to bridge between those two divided group of people to narrowing the division.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Like many divisions that we invent in our minds, this division also is a false dichotomy, like the elite and the people. You have the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, and a group of other billionaires like Donald Trump who is a billionaire claiming that they are against elites. If you’re not an elite, so what is an elite? Like the richest person in the world is not an elite. All these billionaires are now running the US government. Oh, they are not elite. Why? I mean the word elite has become kind of a negative term that you just put on your political rivals.

The fact is that every human group has an elite. I mean you cannot run any group of people, not even a football club. You always have people who are more talented in this or have more power or more influence. This is just the nature of human society. The problem is not with the existence of elite. The main question to ask, is it a serving elite or is it a self-serving elite?

If you have a group of people from a small group of friends all the way to entire country or the whole planet and the people who have the most influence there, they use their power only for their own self benefit. This is a very bad situation. The ideal is that the people who have more talent in a particular field or more influence or more power, they use it for the benefit of society. The fantasy of we can just create a society without any elite, that never works. It’s always a trick of some people to gain power for themselves.

The biggest experiment in creating completely equal society without any elite was communism. And we all know how well this led to. So is North Korea a society without any elite? Maybe because there is just one. But this is not what we should be aiming towards.

Building Trust in the Digital Age

I think especially for an institution like this and for all universities, the purpose is not to destroy elites or break down all barriers between these groups. The purpose is to create a serving elite. That people who have more talent in a particular field, they have more influence in that particular field and they use their talents and their power, not just for their personal benefit, but for the benefit of all. That should be the aim.

KOHEI ITOH: More people are now living in cyberspace and just following, let’s say, tweets under two hundred eighty characters and accents and so on. How should educational institutions like us and also K-twelve secondary primary education tackle the challenge of having younger generation be able to read this size book, thought provoking books that makes us think and we’ll also discuss. But that’s getting more and more difficult for us. So what’s the role of education to basically maintain the intellectual ability of human being?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I mean in previous eras, educational institutions focused on providing people with information because information was scarce. It was a scarce commodity. Maybe you live in a distant town and there is just one library in the town with just 100 books. So just getting a book was very difficult. Now it’s exactly the opposite.

People don’t need more information. We are flooded by enormous amounts of information. And the main thing to understand is that information isn’t truth. The truth is a very rare subset of information. If you think about all the information in the world, the truth is a very, very small percentage of that.

Most information is junk. Most information is fiction and fantasy and lies and propaganda and so forth. And there is a very easy way to understand why. The truth is costly, whereas fiction is cheap. If you want to write a truthful account of anything you need to do research.

You need to spend time on analyzing it, on fact checking it. It takes time and effort and money. Fiction is very cheap. You just write anything that comes up in your mind, very cheap. Secondly, the truth tends to be complicated because reality is complicated.

Like if you want to write an account about quantum physics, it’s complicated. Whereas people usually don’t like complicated narratives. They want simple stories. And again, fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be because you just invent it. And finally, the truth is often painful. Not always, but some parts of reality are uncomfortable.

From the level of individual, this is why people go to therapy because if everything about me was so pleasant and fun, I wouldn’t need a therapist to help me acknowledge the painful memories or painful patterns that I have inside myself. And this is true all the way to entire nations that often don’t want to recognize some painful parts of their history or of their society. So the truth is sometimes painful. Fiction can be made as flattering as you would like it to be.

So in this competition between costly and complicated and painful truth and cheap, simple, attractive fiction, fiction wins. The world is flooded by enormous amounts of fiction. The job, the task of institutions like universities, like newspapers is not just to provide people with more information. They have too much of it. To provide them with a method to find these rare gems of truth inside the ocean of information and to know how to tell the difference.

So as a historian, the main thing I teach my students in history class is not facts about the past. Oh, this king won that battle against that king in that year. They don’t need me. They can just Google it. What they still need to learn in history department is how do I tell the difference between a reliable historical source and an unreliable source? A source may be something I just read today on the internet.

How do I know if I can trust this TikTok video or not? A source can be something from the middle ages. You find a document from a thousand years ago. How do you know the king wrote that he won this battle? How do you know whether to believe? Because people lied also a thousand years ago, not just today.

So that’s the main question. And that’s in every scientific discipline, of course, it’s a bit different. But the key question is not about getting more information. It’s about how do we tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information? The same thing in experiments, in physics or in chemistry. How do I know whether this experiment was ran correctly and I can trust the outcome or there was some problem and I shouldn’t trust it?

KOHEI ITOH: You said truth can sometimes be painful. And indeed reading Nexus brings at least brought me a wide variety of emotions. But at the same time, it gave me hope that it’s not too late. And there’s a human nature that can ability to self correct and also ability to cooperate, work together. If only we had time, I suppose, right, before AI gets somewhere else. There should be a way for us to cope with this. And this is why as Professor Yamamoto stated, we established a so called Cross Dignity Center where we, humanity and also social science professors, academicians get together to tackle exactly that. So if you were a research scientist at our Cross Dignity Center, by the way, you’re welcome to join us anytime.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Thank you.

KOHEI ITOH: What would be the research topic of yours?

The Importance of Human Trust

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: How to build trust between humans? I think that is the most urgent because what we see now in the world is a collapse of human trust exactly when we need it most. And the biggest danger in the world still is not AI. It’s the distrust between humans. If humans could trust each other and cooperate, we could still devise ways to develop AI in a safe way. It’s the distrust between humans that make the AI revolution so dangerous. So I would focus on that. It’s not too late to build enough trust between human beings to keep AI under control.

KOHEI ITOH: And what would be your approach to tackle this challenge of building trust?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I think we need input and this is why an interdisciplinary center is the ideal place to do it because no single discipline can tackle this question by itself. You need input from biology and psychology because we are still animals. You need to understand our animal inheritance. And you can learn a lot from how chimpanzees for instance build trust or fail to build trust between themselves to understand how humans function.

You need the input from economics, of course from computer science because today all social systems are based on the new information technology. So a lot of lessons about how to build trust between humans that were very successful until say ten, twenty years ago are now obsolete because now humans communicate through computers.

And there is a huge discussion about what has caused this collapse of human trust over the last ten or twenty years. It’s such again, it’s a paradox because humanity is in the best condition we were ever in. You look at most of the kind of hard data, things like child mortality, like disease, like famine, it all goes down. We are in the best situation ever and yet people are so angry and so frustrated and can’t talk with each other. What happened?

What happened is that a new technology came between humans. And now most human communication is mediated by a non-human agent, which is creating havoc in the world. So to rebuild trust, we can’t go back. We can’t say, okay, let’s just throw away all the smartphones and computers. It won’t work. So we need to relearn how to build trust between masses of people with this mediation of information technology.

KOHEI ITOH: Your book is so readable. It’s very different from academic writing, so to say. Do you do this intentionally?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Absolutely. I mean, I see my job as building a bridge between the world of academic studies where mostly experts talk with other experts in a language that is very difficult for lay people without academic background to access. So I try to take the most up to date theories and models and findings of the academic and scientific community and relay it, explain it in a way that will be easily accessible, say even to high school students or to any person who wants to understand what is this AI revolution. I never studied computers. I don’t want to have all these graphs and equations. Can I understand in a simple language what is the AI revolution and what is the history of information? So this was the aim of writing the book.

KOHEI ITOH: And how do you feel that your effort is penetrating into cyberspace, those who live in cyberspace?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s very difficult to know. I mean, you write a book, you release it to the world. What impact it will actually have on people? Very difficult to know. We have—I mean, one of the things that helped the book is that it’s not only me. My husband and I established a social impact company at the same time ten years ago that Homo Deus was published.

And I’m in charge of writing the books and he is in charge of all the business side. And we have a team of 20 people working for us. One of them is here in Tokyo and with social media accounts and trying to take the ideas the book and translate them into more and more media so they could reach more and more people. And whether this will be enough, we don’t know.

I mean, we feel that each person has some little agency in the world. We try to do what we can and trust other people to do what they can. Nobody can carry the entire world just on their shoulders. If enough people do what they can in their small field of activity, I think we’ll be okay.

Global Developments and Concerns

KOHEI ITOH: NEXUS just came out in Japanese. So that’s why you’re here. But NEXUS original version came out last year, in September, in English. How do you see the development, especially the Trump administration started and there are so many developments globally?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s been very worrying, again, because of the accelerating erosion of trust within societies and between societies. We see that the international order is collapsing and the international order established after the Second World War. Its most important taboo, its most important rule was that strong countries cannot just invade and conquer weaker countries.

And this was in complete opposite to thousands of years of previous history when for thousands of years this was the ordinary thing that a stronger country would just invade and conquer its neighbors and establish a bigger country, an empire. And humanity enjoyed in the early twenty-first century the most peaceful and prosperous era in its history largely because this taboo was maintained. There were conflict in parts of the world. I come from the Middle East, I come from Israel. I know this perfectly well that it was not a perfect order, but it was better than anything that existed previously.

You could see it most easily in the budget of governments. For most of history, more than 50% of the budget of every king and shogun and emperor was on the military. Soldiers, warships, castles, this was the main government expenditure. In the early twenty-first century, average government expenditure on the military went down to about 6% or 7%. It’s an amazing achievement. About 10% went to healthcare. For the first time in human history that governments all over the world spent more on healthcare than on the military.

This is now going in reverse. As a result of Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine and of other developments, you see defense budgets skyrocket and this will come at the expense of healthcare and education. And frankly, the Trump administration is not making things any better. Listen to Trump blaming Ukraine for the war. And it’s very clear that what he has in mind is a world order in which the proper thing is for the weak to obey the strong. And if the weak refuse to obey the strong, the weaker to blame for the resulting conflict.

And you see it like it threatens that The United States now wants to conquer Greenland. Now if Denmark on Greenland say, but we don’t want to be part of The US and as a result there is a war, in Trump’s mind who is to blame for that? Denmark is to blame. Because United States is strong, you must obey the strong. If you don’t obey the strong and there is a war, the weak are to blame. They should have obeyed the strong.

Now this kind of worldview, this kind of logic will bring all humankind back to a constant state of war. And in this situation, it’s not just healthcare and education budgets that will go down. Any chance of regulating AI will not be possible because every country will say we have to win the AI race. We are not going to do anything that might slow us down and then the other side wins and then they are the strong and we have to obey them.

KOHEI ITOH: Yet your book gives us a hope.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Again, as long as we haven’t reached that point, there is still hope. And if enough people do the right thing in the coming months and years, humanity will still be okay.

KOHEI ITOH: Thank you so much. Time’s up, she said. So thank you so much, Yuval. Has been so wonderful, and so we’re so delighted to have you. So thank you so much. We stay here for to receive more questions.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Thank you, Professor Harari and President. Thank you for a great discussion. I was really impressed as a Co-Director of the Cross Dignity Center. Yes, I’m thinking of now I’m thinking about a new project in the Cross Dignity Center, which is related to how to trust human beings. Thank you very much.

So I’m going to speak in Japanese for Japanese students and Japanese reporters. And due to editing issues of news organizations, I like you to ask a question in Japanese. Okay.

The Power of Shared Stories

Yes, I know you students can speak English fluently, but yes, editing issue. Thank you. Okay. So yes, our special ability as homo sapiens is to organize very large cooperation between thousands and millions and billions of people through shared stories, through shared narratives, not just about gods and religions, but also in the economy. Like the most successful story ever invented is probably money.

That it’s the only story that everybody believes. Not everybody believes in God, in this God or that God, but even people who completely disagree about other things. You look at The United States, Republicans and Democrats cannot agree about anything except the dollar. If a Republican comes with a dollar, the Democrats will accept it and sell whatever it is, bread or gas and vice versa. Even this is now under threat with cryptocurrency because there are other people who say we don’t want the dollar, we want crypto.

And this is a very important indication because dollar is human currency. It’s produced by human institutions like banks. Crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum and so forth is a post human currency produced by algorithms. The people who say I don’t trust dollar, trust Bitcoin, what they actually say is I don’t trust humans, I trust algorithms. I don’t trust the humans who run the banks, I prefer to trust the algorithms who run the cryptocurrency networks.

The Shift from Human to Algorithmic Control

Now, this you see in more and more areas. Also, you talked about bureaucracy earlier. So you see at the same time that Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they are firing tens of thousands of human bureaucrats, but they are not really against bureaucracy because they simply replace them with digital bureaucrats, with algorithms. And this is the shifting power from humans to algorithms. When it comes to stories, this is where social media is most relevant.

That previously all the stories that circulated in the world, they came from the human mind. And it was human editors who decided what stories will dominate the conversation. Like you have a newspaper, you have a TV station. So you have a human editor going over all the stories that were published today and say, Oh, this is the most important story. We’ll publish this on the front page.

And everybody reads this and talk about it. Now this job too is done by an algorithm. If you ask who are the most important editors in the world right now, they are the editors of TikTok and Facebook and Twitter and they are not human. They are algorithms. So the stories are being produced by and spread by non human intelligence to maintain human trust and cooperation.

Banning Fake Humans

I think it’s a complete solution of course, but the first and simplest thing every government should do is pass a law banning fake humans, banning counterfeit humans. The same way there is a law that bans counterfeit money. You cannot just print yen and pretend this is real. No, you can’t. Same thing with human beings.

Until today you couldn’t create fake humans. Now you can. Bots can pretend to be humans. Much of the traffic in places like TikTok and like X Twitter is run by bots that pretend to be human beings. So the first and simplest step to take have a very strict law.

You cannot fake humans. AIs are welcome to talk with us on condition that they identify as an AI. If somebody tries to fake humans or if a platform doesn’t take action against fake humans, they should go to jail the same way that if somebody has a printing press or print shop and people there try to print Yen’s, what will happen to the owner of the print shop? He goes to jail. Should be the same thing even worse with trying to fake humans.

Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Information

Thank you. So when it comes to fake news and disinformation and all that, we need to differentiate between freedom of speech and freedom of information. Freedom of speech is given to human beings. It’s a human right, a very important human right, which should be protected. Whether it is here in this hall, whether it is on TikTok or Facebook or anywhere else, human beings except in extreme situations should have the right to express their views without fear of being punished for it.

This should be protected. Failure of information is something very different. It’s a new right, which is given not to human beings, it’s given to AIs and algorithms and bots. When a lot of the social media giants, they intentionally confuse the two rights. The problem on social media is not that human beings invent lies.

Human beings have been inventing lies for thousands of years. Except in extreme circumstances, they should not be punished. But the problem is that then you have an algorithm that decides to deliberately spread lies and hate and so forth. And this should be stopped and this should be punished. Again, it’s not if I’m a user on YouTube and I created a fake news video, I should not be punished for it.

But if I’m the company and I deliberately recommend and play this hate field conspiracy theory to millions of people because I make money out of it, this should be punished. And this is not protected by freedom of speech because this is done by algorithms and algorithms don’t have rights. They don’t have the right to spread lies. It is the job of the social media companies the same way the job of newspapers and TV stations before they disseminate something to make sure that it is the truth and it is not some hate filled lies.

The Physical World and AI

Yes, mean, the physical world is still there. I mean, none of the developments of information technology abolishes the physical world. It’s another layer built on top of it. This has been, if you go back thousands of years, so all the information created by humans, whether it’s laws and constitutions, whether it’s religion, whether it’s money, it did not replace or abolish the physical and biological reality. People still have bodies, they need to eat, they need clean water, But all these additional layer of stories, it enabled people to create things like trade networks that changed the way we get food. Like a hundred thousand years ago, you’re hungry, you go to the forest, to the savannah, to sea, you fish, you hunt, you gather fruits, you eat.

Now very few people do that. Almost everybody depends on a global trade network which is managed by information in order to get their food. So the same is likely to happen with AI whether it’s in peace or in war. War ultimately is still about killing people. But the way it is done is changing.

AI and Warfare

What we saw in recent wars, not just in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also I know it more from the war in my country between Israelis and Palestinians. A lot of people expected AI to change war by doing the actual shooting. Like people watched all these Hollywood movies about killer robots. So they now look on television and they don’t see killer robots. The killing is still done by human beings.

What’s really changed already with AI is who is choosing the targets, who is making the decisions, who decided to bomb this building, who decided to bomb this person? And increasingly the answer is AI. This is something that happened really over the last two, three years. Previously, the job of identifying targets was done by human intelligence officers. They would gather all this information and start reading all these reports.

And it would take them days to say, Oh, this building, this is enemy headquarter, bomb it. Now it’s done in seconds by AI. AI goes over enormous amounts of information that no human being can analyze. It spots patterns that no human being is able to spot. And within seconds says, this is enemy headquarter, bomb it.

But statistical probability, right? With statistical probability and with a lot of other computer very complex mathematical models. Of course, the big question is can we believe the AI? Maybe it made a mistake. Maybe it told us to bomb a building which is civilian, not military.

And I talk with different people. They tell me different stories. Some people say, oh, after the AI points to a target, we get human analysts to go over all the information and make sure there is no mistake. Other people say, nah, the human analyst spent something like half a minute. Nobody can really check the AI.

It goes over so many data points. So basically they’ll just rubber stamp. And the one making the decision is AI. Now I don’t know probably sometimes like this, sometimes like this, but looking to the future, five years, ten years in the future, it’s very clear what the trend is. That increasingly the AI will be making the key decisions in warfare.

And this is, of course, a very dangerous development. Thank you.

Conspiracy Theories in the Age of AI

Theories are not something new. They have been around throughout history. This is related to what we mentioned earlier of a key difference between truth and fiction is the truth is complicated.

Fiction is simple. When there is something like a big pandemic that changes so many things, the truth of the pandemic is very complicated. Simply to understand what a virus is. A virus is such a strange thing. Humans for most of history never knew that viruses existed.

Only in the last century we really began to understand what viruses are. And the strange thing about them is that they are not exactly alive and not exactly not alive. There is a huge debate in the scientific community. Are viruses a form of life or are are they part of biology or are they actually just some chemical information? Because a virus cannot reproduce by itself.

A virus doesn’t eat. It’s not like a bacteria that eats things and reproduces. A virus is really just a bit of information. And the amazing ability of this bit of genetic code is to get into the cells of my body and tell my own body, my own cells to start producing more copies of that code. So you start with one code, one line of code, it takes over a cell in my body, you get a million copies of that code.

They spread to other cells. They tell the other cells, produce more copies of that code. This is how it goes viral. And this is such a strange thing. We don’t see things like that happening on our level of reality.

It’s happening on a very, very small level of reality. So to understand how a pandemic begins and spreads, very complicated. It’s much easier to believe a conspiracy theory. Oh, there is a group of very powerful people. They created this pandemic to take over the world.

The one thing I can tell you as a historian is that these types of conspiracies are always wrong for the simple reason the world is too complicated for any small number of people to really understand it and manipulate it. The level of manipulation that conspiracy theories usually assume is completely unrealistic. You look at how governments, even if you have a government with all the power of a government that tries to do something, very often it fails. Like I don’t know, the Americans decide to invade Iraq. They are the strongest country in the world.

They have all these military power and they fail. Yes, they managed to conquer Iraq. Then everything goes off plan. And eventually it’s Iran that becomes the main beneficiary, the victor of the war. So the Americans had one plan, something completely different happened.

This is how the actual world functions. And conspiracy theories, they are usually this kind of wishful thinking that the world is a very simple place. If a couple of people in a room can plan to take over the world and then they just do it. Never happens. Okay.

AI and the Future of Entertainment

Thank you very much. You just say how what will exactly change? And we don’t know, we can’t predict, but it’s very clear that more and more both the form and the content of entertainment will come from AI and not from human beings. Previously in history, all entertainment, whether it’s poetry or theater, television, movies, everything came out of the human mind, of the human imagination. Now we have something on the planet that is capable of producing such things perhaps certainly far more cheaply than human beings and far more efficiently and also break out of the limitations of the human imagination.

Because the human imagination is limited by the human brain, by our own biological limitations. AI isn’t. So to take an example from a slightly different area like the game of Go, in 2016 there was this very famous game between AlphaGo and AI and Lisa Dole, one of the Go world champion. And AlphaGo won. It was one of the decisive moments in the AI revolution.

But the amazing thing about the game wasn’t just that AlphaGo defeated the UN world champion, it’s the way he did it. It came up with strategies that were completely alien that humans have been playing Go in East Asia for thousands of years. It was invented more than two thousand years ago. Tens of millions of people played Go. It was considered a form of out, not just a game.

Entire philosophies developed around how to play Go. And yet all those years, all those people, nobody ever thought of playing Go like AlphaGo. So you can imagine it like a landscape, like a planet, planets Go, all the different ways to play Go. And humans have been stuck on one island in planet Go and they thought this was the whole planet. For two thousand years they thought these are the only ways to play Go.

They couldn’t leave this mental island because our minds are limited. Then AlphaGo came and said, look, you can play like this. You can play like this. You can discovered entire new areas on the planet Go. The same thing is likely to happen in music, in painting, in theater, in television.

It’s already happening. So many people are now playing with using AI to create videos. And this is just the very beginning of the process. If you think the AIs of today are sophisticated, it’s nothing compared to what we will have in ten years. So like other fields also at entertainment will change completely.

Human Dignity in the Age of AI: Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation with Kohei Itoh

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And it’s impossible to predict in what ways because, and this is the nature of AI is that it’s an alien form of intelligence. So human intelligence cannot predict what the alien intelligence will do. If you can predict everything the AI is going to do, it’s not an AI. It’s just some automatic machine. Like if you have a coffee machine and you can predict everything the coffee machine will do, I press this button, it makes espresso.

This is an automatic machine. It is not an AI. When is it an AI? When you press a button, you don’t even press any button. You just approach the machine and the machines tells you, “Hey, I just invented this morning a new drink that I think you would like better than coffee and I made you a cup.”

Yeah, so as I said, I agree this is the biggest question. How to reach agreement between humans in an era when communication between humans is being twisted and manipulated by the new information technology. I don’t know. And I was asked earlier what is the research project? If I knew the answer, no need of research project because we already have the answer.

I think one of the most important thing in science is to admit ignorance. For me, the scientific revolution looking back in history was a revolution of ignorance, not of knowledge. Before science, every human group, every human culture said, we already know everything. Everything is in the holy books or our holy men and sometimes holy women know everything. No need of new research.

The scientific revolution was about people coming and saying, we don’t know. That’s a very important thing. We really want to know this, the answer to this question and we don’t know what it is. Oh, so we need to do research. And this is still the case right now. So then if you’re asking what is the most important research subjects not just for the research center here but generally, I would say this is the research subject.

And to like really kind of focus it, it’s not a general question about how to establish trust between humans. It’s how to establish trust between humans when they mostly communicate through this new technology the digital infrastructure of computers and social media and AI. Everything we thought we learned about building trust over thousands of years is coming into question. And we need more scientists, more scholars, more researchers focusing on that issue. I think Professor Yamaguchto and his colleagues will conduct this as a Yuval Harari project within the center.

KOHEI ITOH: So you’re welcome to join the center. Yes, please. AI is now revolutionizing scientific research as you said. We just saw Nobel prizes, two Nobel prizes in physics and in chemistry actually go to AI. And I was especially amazed by the AI Nobel Prize in chemistry, which was given to the developers of AlphaFold.

And I mean, they’re brilliant people. I’m not sure they are chemists. I mean, they needed deep understanding of chemistry to develop AlphaFold, of course, but their background is not in chemistry. But their creation completely changed chemistry and will change biology and will change medicine production by solving this huge scientific puzzle of predicting how proteins fold. Now, what this tells us is not just that AI will become better than humans in more and more scientific areas, but that it will be able as you said to break the barriers.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Humans have a limited capacity. Like I studied history for many years. I don’t have time to study physics deeply or to study chemistry deeply. This is why we have this division in the university. This is the physics department, this is history department.

You can’t do both. For AI there is no limitation like that. So in a way AI could bring a much more holistic approach to science. Maybe not AlphaFold, maybe not the AI of today, but the AI of ten years from now, you can have an AI network which understands very deeply chemistry and economics and history and can combine data and models from all these very different disciplines. The question then becomes so what would be the role of humans in such a situation?

And again, we don’t know. I mean, given the pace of development and the potential, it’s not clear what would be still, what could humans contribute to research in ten or twenty years.

KOHEI ITOH: Thank you very much. Yes.

The Future of Economics and Finance

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I’m afraid I again have to say that I don’t really know that this is again one of these frontiers of knowledge and research which we should invest in.

Maybe I take an example now from economics. I talked earlier about money being the most successful story ever invented. Money is not an objective reality. It has no objective value. You can’t eat it.

Most money in the world is not even coins and paper notes. It’s just information in computers. But money is now undergoing a revolution with the rise of cryptocurrencies. The next revolution might be the appearance of money that only computers understand. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they are produced by algorithms but their value still depends on the belief of human beings.

When Trump gets elected, value of Bitcoin goes up because humans believe, oh, will deregulate crypto so I better invest in Bitcoin. And then more people think like that and the value of Bitcoin goes up. So it’s still human belief that is the basis for the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The next step is for digital currencies whose value depends only on the beliefs of AIs and algorithms. Even today, a large part of the trade in the world, trade in bonds and stocks and foreign exchange, it’s just algorithms trading with other algorithms.

And especially if humans deregulate the financial markets, which is what the Trump administration is all about. So we are likely to see new financial devices, new kinds of money, which only AIs understand and AIs trade with other AIs. And what happens in a world when humans no longer understand finance? This can happen in ten years or so.

Think horses and money. People have been buying and selling horses for money for thousands of years, but the horses never understood what was happening. The horse could see that say one samurai is giving some piece of shiny metal to a merchant and gets me, the horse in return. But what was happening there? What is this worthless piece of metal? The horses never understood money.

Only humans understood them, which is why we control the horses and not vice versa. In ten years, our life could be managed by financial transactions between algorithms that we can’t understand. That whether we get a loan to buy a house will be decided by algorithms talking with algorithms in a financial language which is unintelligible to human beings, not because we didn’t go to college or because we, but simply because it’s mathematically the algorithms can have mathematical models of the economy which are too complicated for the organic human brain. What is the meaning say for democracies if not even the prime minister or the finance minister understand finance anymore? There is a financial crisis but no human being understands why there is a financial crisis and what can be done about it.

And it’s not just a problem for democracies, also for dictatorships. The biggest fear of every dictator in history is to have a subordinate that becomes more powerful than me. Like if you are Putin or if you are Kim, your biggest fear, the thing that keeps you up at night is maybe the defense minister is plotting against me. Maybe some army general will have a coup and kill me, take my place. That’s the biggest fear.

And so for them, if AI becomes so powerful that I can no longer understand the AI, it’s a threat even to human dictators. So this is a kind of inter subjective computer reality which we are likely to see very soon, especially if we deregulate financial markets. Again, same way that a government can have a law, no fake humans, AIs can’t pretend to be humans. Governments can also regulate financial markets. No, all financial devices that are tradable in the market must be vetted by humans.

We don’t allow. But with the current trend, we are likely to see a post human financial system very soon. And if there is a big financial crisis in the post human financial system, the humans will suffer greatly.

KOHEI ITOH: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Professor Harari, in closing, please could you give us your thoughts on today’s talk and Q and A session and a message to the students? Closing remarks.

Closing Remarks

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: So there is a lot to think about. There is a lot to research. Again, the key thing many of the things we talked about sound very frightening.

Part of the problem is you have the people who in the companies that develop the AI that talk about all the positive potential of AI. So to balance it, you need philosophers and historians and critics to say, wait a minute, there are also dangers. So I find myself in occasions like this talking mainly about the dangers. But of course there is also enormous positive potential otherwise nobody would develop the technology in fields ranging from medicine to preventing catastrophic climate change. And it’s definitely there.

There is enormous positive potential. The question is not how to stop the development of AI. This is unrealistic and undesired. We want to develop it. We just want to do it in a safe way.

And here again the key is to build trust between human beings. There is a lot that every person can do in your specific field. So sometimes people feel crushed by the weight of the world that all these problems, how can we solve them? Don’t feel like the whole world is just on your shoulders. There are more than 8 billion other humans on the planet. So they share in this weight of holding the planet.

And of course, are not just humans. They are also animals and plants and other organisms and each one doing their small little thing. When I think about trust, which was maybe the major theme of our meeting, maybe I would leave you with the following thought that trust is really the foundation of life in the sense that if you don’t trust others, if you don’t trust what is outside you, you cannot live for a single minute. Because even the air we breathe, like this simple movement that sustains life, the breath, what is it? It is trusting in what is outside us.

You have all these people today including the most powerful people in the world that they want to be separate. All they think about is separating things, building barriers and borders and walls. And actually complete separation is death. Every moment we have this simple gesture of trust in what is outside us. We open our mouth or our nose and we take in something from the outside.

We have trust in it and then we give it back. And this is the in and out movement of trust that sustains life. If you don’t trust what is outside you and you just block your mouth and your nose, you die within a minute or two. So yeah, I know there is a lot of reason for anxiety, for fear. It’s real. It’s not imaginary. There are huge problems in the world, but ultimately the basis of life is trust.

Thank you.

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