YouSaid · the spoken record
Yuval Noah Harari
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- 2023-07-17
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- 2023-07-17
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“I hope so very much. I'm going to many of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we fail, this is the end of Israeli democracy probably. This will have repercussions far beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world, able to strike basically anywhere in the world. If this country becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to the entire Middle East. It can have destabilizing effects far beyond the borders of Israel.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they openly talk about it that once they have it, then they will take away the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people, of women, of secular Jews. And this is why you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You have Aeroforce pilots saying we stop flying. This is unheard of in Israel. I mean, we are still living under existential threat From Iran, from other enemies, and in the middle of this, you have Air Force pilots who dedicated their lives to protecting the country, and they are saying that's it. If this government doesn't stop what it is doing, we stop flying.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and all the federal structure. In Israel, we have just a single check on the power of the government, and that's the Supreme Court There is really no difference between the government and the legislature because there are no separate elections like in the US. If you win majority in the Knesset in the parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple. And if you have 61 members of Knesset who vote, let's say on a law to take away voting rights from Arab citizens of Israel, there is a single check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land and that's a Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over the Supreme Court and they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it. What will happen the moment that this last check on the power is gone? They are openly trying to gain unlimited power.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the United States, for instance, there are lots of checks and balances that limit the power of the government. You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the House of Representatives, you have the president, you have the Constitution, you have 50 states, each state with its own constitution and Supreme Court and Congress and governor. If somebody wants to pass a dangerous legislation, say, in the House, it will have to go through so many obstacles, like if you want to pass a law in the United States taking away voting rights from Jews or from Muslims or from African Americans, even if it passes, even if it has a majority in the House of Representatives, it is a very, very, very small chance of becoming the law of the country because it will have to pass again through the Senate, through the president, through the Supreme Court.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, he is basically tearing apart the social contract that held this country together for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go too deep unless you want to, because I guess most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on their minds than the fate of some small country in the Middle East. But for those who want to understand what's happening in Israel, there is really just one question to ask. limits the power of the government.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was very, what will he say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. You know, he had to cut short the interview from three hours to one hour because you had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and say, no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You that you asked him. You asked him, are you afraid of this thing that power corrupts? He didn't think for a single second. He didn't pause, he didn't admit a tiny little level of doubt. No, power doesn't corrupt. For me it was a shocking and revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with how you began the interview. that I really liked your opening gambit. No, really? You kind of told him, you know, lots of people in the world are angry with you. Some people hate you. They dislike you. What do you want to tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 1910s or 1920s, and you grow up in Nazi Germany, that's bad moral luck. Your chances of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it. And you can withstand it, but it will take tremendous effort. If you were born in Germany after the war, you're morally lucky. You will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert this enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. So there is just part of history. There is an element of luck. But again, part of it is also self-awareness. And you ask me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt. And I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I wouldn't say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible. There is a large element. It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life. Part of it depends on moral luck. Know if you are born as a Christian German,”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why we need checks and balances and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check itself could make terrible mistakes. So you need a press. You need the media to serve as a check to the government. You don't have just one newspaper or one TV station. You need many so that they can balance each other. And the media is not enough. So if you have independent courts, you have free academic institutions. You have NGOs. You have a lot of checks and balances.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they believe in infallibility. In this sense, they are very close to being religions. In Nazism, Hitler was considered infallible. And therefore, you don't need any checks and balances on his power. Why do you need to balance an infallible genius? And it's the same with the Soviet Union with Stalin and more generally with the Communist Party. The party can never make a mistake. And therefore, you don't need independent courts, independent media, opposition parties, things like that, because the party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way 100% of loyalty should be to the party, a hundred percent of power should be in the hands of the party. The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is fallible. All people or leaders or political parties or institutions.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one your loyalty, 100% of it should be only to one thing. Now liberalism has a much more complex view of the world. It says yes there are nations, they are important, yes, there are classes, they are important, but they are not the only thing. There are also families. There are also individuals. There are also animals. And your loyalty should be divided between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this. Sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated. But life is complicated.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people, disregard again, for human suffering. Like, okay, in order to for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those millions, kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics, truth. They don't matter. The only thing that matters is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. And liberalism was the antithesis to that. It says not only it has a much more complicated view of the world. And both communism and fascism, they are the very simple view of the world.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, your loyalty is to the party which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle. And the same way in communism out is only about class struggle. A movie is good if it serves the interest of the proletariat. Autistic values, there is nothing like that. And the same with truth. Everything that we see now in fake news, you know, the communist propaganda machine was there before us. The level of lies, of disinformation campaigns that they orchestrated in the 1920s and 30s and 40s is really unimaginable.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communists are a bit like the fascists, instead that they don't place the nation at the main hero, they place class as the main hero. For them, history again, it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is the clash between classes. And just as fascists imagine in the end, only one nation will be on top. The communists think in the end only one class should be on top, and that's the proletariat. And same story. And like if there is a clash, say, between class and family, class wins. Like in the Soviet Union, the party told children, if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. And there are many cases when children reported their parents and their parents were sent to the gulag.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against the interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says no. There is aesthetic values in the world which should judge movies not just on the question whether they serve the national interest, but also on autistic value.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They say the supreme good is the good of the nation. You should have a harmed percent loyalty only to the nation. You know, liberals say yes, you should be loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in the world, the human rights, there is truth, there is beauty. Many times, yes, you should prefer the interests of your nation over other things, but not always. If your nation tells you to murder millions of innocent people, you don't do that. Even though the nation tells you to do it. To lie for the national interest, you know, in extreme situations, maybe, but in many cases, your loyalty should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation look a bit, not in the best light. The same with beauty. You know, how does the fascists determine whether a movie is a good movie?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists, they answer differently. For them, history is not, yes, history is about humans. Humans are the big heroes of history, but not individual humans and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as a clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside force. Do you think people should have the right to the liberty to choose their own profession or either born into some caste that predetermines what they do? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own spouse and their own way of personal life instead of being told by elders or parents who to marry and how to live? Now if you answered yes to all three questions, people should have the liberty to choose their government, their profession, their personal lives, their spouse, then you're a liberal.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And humanism basically is the focus is on humans, that they are the most important thing in the world. They move history. But then there is a big question, what are humans? What is humanity? Now, liberals, they place at the center of the story individual humans, and they don't see history as a kind of necessary collision between big forces. They place the individual at the center. If you want to know, you know, there is a bad, especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the opposite of conservative. But it's to test whether you're liberal, you need to answer just three questions, very simple. Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government or the government should be imposed by some”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communism is the same. Also, you look in the communist mirror, you're the most ethical, wonderful person ever. It's very difficult to see Stalin underneath it.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you look at Darth Vader. This is not somebody you would like to follow. Christianity got things much better when he described the devil as being very beautiful and attractive. That's the danger that you see something as very beautiful, you don't understand the monster underneath.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when people hear that, you know, it's like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I'm beautiful. We've never done anything wrong. We are victims. Everybody is. And when you look and you heard in school that fascism, that fascists are monsters, and you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful. And you say, I can't be a fascist because fascists are monsters, and this is so beautiful, so it can't be. When you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world. And that's the danger. This is the problem, you know, with Hollywood's, you know, I look at Voldemort. in Harry Potter. Who would like to follow this creep?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it makes people, it actually exposes us. Why? Because people hear, oh, fascism is this monster. And then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, you are wonderful. You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You're beautiful. You're ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil monsters out there that are out to get you, and they are causing all the problems in the world.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what you see is that politicians like Hitler create a very simple story. We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody is against us. Everybody's trying to trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things people don't understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. And at some level, this is wrong”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at stories, at the competition between different stories and between stories fiction and the truth, The truth has two big problems. The truth tends to be complicated, and the truth tends to be painful. The real story of let's talk about nations, the real story of every nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things. Now if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don't want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it's fiction.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of it is part of the appeal of, again, Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He sold people a story. The fact that he was nobody made it even more effective because people at that time, after the defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by all the established elites, by all the established institutions. Oh, all these professors and politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people, they led us to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation. So we don't want any of them. And then you have this nobody, a corporal with no money, with no education, with no titles, with nothing. And he tells people I'm one of the... And this made him one reason why he was so popular. And then the story he told”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after they lost, then they became one of the most prosperous countries in the world because their enemies that defeated them evidently supported them and allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation. So, you know, if you can lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have script the war. You didn't need it. I mean, you really had to have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany in the 1960s. Absolutely not. And it's the same with Japan. It's the same with Italy. So it was not inevitable, it was not the forces of history that necessitated, that forced Germany to take this path.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know for a fact it was an unnecessary path to take because in the 1920s and 30s the Nazis said that this unless Germany take this road it will never be prosperous. It will never be successful. All the other countries will keep stepping on it. This was their claim. And we know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, they lost the second”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don't think it was inevitable. I think that a few things were different, there would have been no Third Reich. There would have been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would have been inevitable, then, you know, what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws of physics. But the tragedy is, no, it was decisions by humans that led to that direction. You know, even from the viewpoint of the Germans,”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charismatic leader. But then the small changes they can have a big effect. I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine, there was a moment now it's a struggle between nations. But there was a moment when the decision was taken in the mind of a single individual of Vladimir Putin and he could have decided otherwise and the world would have looked completely different.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empire at that time was also shaping up to be a major maritime empire. If you have America rich being rich by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It's the same with the computer. Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th century. But the where and when is crucial. The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don't know, Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference. So you have this interplay between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any single”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's an interplay because you have the kind of structural forces. That you look at the geography of the planet and you look at shipping technology in the late 15th century in Europe and the Mediterranean, and it's almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody would discover America, somebody from the old world will get to the new world. So this was not a kind of, this didn't, if it wasn't Columbus, then it would have been a five years later somebody else. The key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference. You know, if it wasn't Columbus, if it was five years later, somebody from England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish. If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history. If you have, and you know, the Ottoman...”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And history often takes, you know, there is a highway and there is a kind of sideway, and history takes the sideways. Many, many times.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think anybody has an answer to that. If you rewind the movie of history and press play and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire in the world maybe twice out of 100 times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. And it's the same with Islam. It's the same, I don't know, with the communist takeover of Russia. In 1914, if you told people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in the Tsarist Empire, they would think you're utterly crazy. You know, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an empire of close to 200 million people. It sounded ludicrous. Now, we know the chain of events. The First World War, the February Revolution, and so forth that led to the communist takeover, but it was such an unlikely event. And it happened.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth, and not, you know, the Roman Empire in the 3rd century CE was a bit like, I don't know, California today, like so many sects and subsects and gurus, like everybody has their own thing. And you have thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian, I don't have a kind of clear answer. You can read the sources and you see how it happened. Oh, this happened and then this happened. And then Constantine adopted it and then this and then this. But why?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is cultural. It comes from stories that are people that believe in different stories. The stories create the identity. The stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over Jerusalem not because of any material interest. Though no oil fields under Jerusalem. And even oil, you need it to realize some cultural fantasy. It doesn't really come from biology. the stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe one story and not another? That's history. There is no material materialistic law. People will always believe this. No, history is full of accidents. How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have some biological objective interests that all humans share, like we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to breathe. But most conflicts in history are not about that. The interests which really drive most conflicts in history don't come from biology. They come from religions and ideologies and stories. So it's not that stories are a smokescreen to hide the real interests. The stories create the interests in the first place. The stories define who are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities, they are not like species, like gorillas and chimpanzees. No. Israelis and Palestinians or Germans and French or Chinese and Americans, they have no essential biological difference between them.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all ideas are an independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that. Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests. And ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are to some extent the opposite.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To understand, maybe we don't understand everything, maybe we made some mistakes, so we tell you that these rules did not come from heaven, they came from us humans. We may have made a mistake. So here is a mechanism for how future generations can amend the Constitution, which was used later on to, for instance, amend the Constitution to ban slavery.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the tenth commandment, for instance, supports slavery. The tenth commandment in the Ten Commandment, it says that you should not covet your neighbor's house or your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's slaves. It's okay to hold slaves according to the Tenth Commandment. It's just bad to covet the slaves of your neighbor. Now, there is no 11th commandment which says, if you don't like some of the previous Ten Commandments, this is how you go about amending them, which is why we still have them unchanged. Now, in the US Constitution, you have all these rights and rules, including originally the ability to hold slaves, but the genius of the founding fathers of the United States, they had the humility.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invented them. And this is truthful. There are fictional rules invented by humans, and this is true. They were invented by humans. And when you are honest about it, it enables you to change the rules, which is being done in football every now and then. It's the same with the fundamental rules of a country. You can pretend that the rules came down from heaven, dictated by God or whatever, and then you can't change them. Or you can be like, you know, the American Constitution, which starts with with the people. The American constitution lays down certain rules for a society, but the amazing thing about it, it does not pretend to come from an external source. The Ten Commandments start with I am your Lord God. And because it starts with that, you can't change them.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They came from our imagination. You know, we look at sports, so we have rules for the game of football, soccer. They were invented by people. Nobody, at least very few people claim that the rules of football came down from heaven.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When somebody's suffering, that's true. I mean, this is why one of the things when you talk about suffering as a kind of ultimate reality, when somebody suffers, that is truth. Now, somebody can suffer because of a fictional story. Like somebody tells people that God said you must go on this crusade and killtics. And this is a completely fictional story. And people believe it and they start a war and they destroy cities and kill people. The people that suffer because of that and even the crusaders themselves that also suffer the consequences of what they do, the suffering is true. Even though it is caused by a fictional story. Similarly, when people agree on certain rules, the rules could come out of our imagination. Now, we can be truthful about it and say these rules, they didn't come from heaven.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a conversation between people. If you know Flood, the public sphere with millions and potentially billions of AI agents that can hold conversations they never sleep, they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own, they can get to know you and tailor their words specifically for you and your life story, they are becoming better than us at creating stories and ideas and so forth. If you flood the public sphere with that, this will ruin the conversation between people. It will ruin the trust between people. You will no longer be able to have a democracy in this situation. You can have other types of regimes, but not democracy.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shouldn't have a voice, they shouldn't talk with us. I'm just saying when they talk with us, it should be clear that they are AI. That's it. You can have your voice as an AI. Again, I have some medical problem. I want to get advice from an AI doctor. That's fine. As long as I know that I'm talking with an AI. What should be banned is AI pretending. This is something that will erode trust and without trust society collapses. This is something that especially will endanger democracies because democracies are built on democracy is a conversation basically.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, in some situations, yes, AIs should interact with us, but it should be very clear this is an AI talking to you, or this is an AI retweeting this story. It is not a human being making a conscious decision.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also banning deepfake of generic humans. You know, which is already happening to some extent on social media. Like if you have lots of bots retweeting something, then you have the impression, oh, lots of people are interested in that. That's important. And this is basically the bots pretending to be humans. Because if you see a tweet which says 500 people retweeted it or you see a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it, I don't care what the bots retweeted, but if it's humans, okay, that's interesting. So we need to be very careful that bots can't do that. They are doing it at present and it should be banned. Now, some people say yes, but freedom of expression. No, bots don't have freedom of expression. There is no cost in terms of freedom of expression when you”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They use again this human strength, this human, the noble part of our nature against us, this should be forbidden. And similarly, on more general level, that it should be forbidden for an AI to pretend to be a human being. That it's okay, you know, there are so many things we can use AIs as teachers, as doctors and so forth, and it's good as long as we know that we are interacting with an AI, we should the same way we ban fake money, we should ban fake humans. It's not just banning deepfakes of specific individuals.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think we have to be very careful about it. And if it emerges spontaneously, we need to be careful. Again, we can't rule out the possibility that AI will develop consciousness. We don't know enough about consciousness to be sure. So if it develops spontaneously, we need to be very careful about how we understand it. But if people intentionally design an AI that they know, they assume it has no consciousness, but in order to manipulate people.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source