YouSaid · the spoken record

Yuval Noah Harari

lines on the record: 186
first: 2023-07-17
most recent: 2023-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's part of the danger. It basically hacks our operating system and it uses some of our best qualities against us. It's very, very good that humans are attuned to suffering and that we don't want to cause suffering, that we have compassion. That's one of the most wonderful things about humans. And if we now create AIs which use this to manipulate us, this is a terrible thing.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the most important thing to ask about AI? Can it suffer? Because if AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection, it needs rights, just like humans and animals.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, to know if you're happy or not, it's a very difficult question. But when you suffer, you know And also in ethical terms, it's more important to be aware of sufferings and of any other emotion. If you're doing something which is causing all kinds of emotions to all kinds of people, first of all, you need to notice if you're causing a lot of suffering to someone. If some people are like it and some people are bothered by it and some people are a bit angry at you and some people are suffering because of what you do, you first of all have to know, oh Now sometimes you still have to do it. You know, the world is a complicated place. I don't know. You have an epidemic, governments decide to have all these social isolation regulations or whatever. So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it even though it can cause tremendous suffering, but you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very, very, you have to ask yourself again and again and again, is it worth it? Is it still worth it?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex situation when history is largely driven by stories, but stories are not the ultimate reality, the ultimate reality is feeling of humans, of animals, and the tragedy of history is very often we get the order wrong. Stories are not bad. Stories are tools. Are good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering. But very often we forget it, instead of using the stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to use us for their purposes. And then you start entire wars because of a story. You inflict millions, suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story. And that's the tragedy of human history.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Countries, which are also stories, nations don't suffer. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer, you have an army with horses and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can't suffer. It's just an imagination. It's just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn't feel anything. Similarly, when a bank goes bankrupt or a company goes bankrupt or when currency loses its value. Like Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed, or the dollar is worth zero. It crashed. The dollar doesn't feel anything. It's the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable. So we have this.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It not only survives, it spreads, it can take over the world. The other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive because they don't feel anything. This goes back to the question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing The ultimatum is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not, you need to ask, can it suffer? Stories don't feel anything”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people like Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You go there. I've lived in Jerusalem much of my life. You go there. It's an ordinary place. You know, it's a town. You have buildings, you have stones, you have trees, you have dogs and cats and pedestrians. It's a regular place. But then you have the stories about the place. Oh, this is the place where God revealed himself. This is the place where Jesus was. This is the place where Muhammad was. And it's the stories that people fight over. Nobody is fighting over the stones. People are fighting about the stories about the stones. And the stories, if a story can get millions of people to fight for it,”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting idea. There are two opposite things to say about it. On the one hand, yes, absolutely. If you look long term in history, all the people die, it's the stories that compete and survive and spread. And stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes their lives. For the story, we know in Israel, this is one of the most important story factories in human history. This is a place where people still kill each other every day over stories. I don't know. You've been to Jerusalem, right?”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough people believe it. It's like with money. Know if you start a new cryptocurrency, if you're the only one that believes the story, I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course, but ultimately it's storytelling. You're selling people a story. If nobody believes your story, You don't have anything, but if lots of people believe that Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Again, why? I mean, you can't eat it, you can't drink it, it's nothing. It's the story around the math, which is the real magic”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mythology. Not everybody believes in God or in the same God. Almost everybody believes in money. Even though it's just a figment of our imagination, you know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value. You can't eat them. You can't drink them. And today, most dollars are not even pieces of paper. They are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason that you have the best storytellers in the world. The bankers, the finance ministers, all these people, they are the best storytellers ever. And they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information, it is worth a banana. And as long as everybody believes it, it works.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you examine any large scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis. It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together. It's most obvious in cases like religion. You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to come together, to fight a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Humans believe these stories, which is why we have these huge religious networks. But it's the same thing with modern politics. It's the same thing with economics. People think, oh, economics, this is rational. It has nothing to do with fictional stories. No. Money is the most successful story ever told. Much more successful than any religious...”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say, 100. Now the global trade network has 8 billion people. Like what we eat, what we wear, it comes from the other side of the world. Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people, even Israel, which is a relatively small country, say 9 million citizens, that's more than the entire population of the planet 10,000 years ago of humans. So we can build these huge networks of cooperation and everything we've accomplished as a species from building the pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that. And then you ask, okay, so what makes it possible for millions of people who don't know each other to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't? And at least my answer is stories, it's fiction. It's the imagination.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, you have advantages on both sides. And what really made us successful, what made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability, but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say, 50 chimpanzees, a 100 chimpanzees. As far as we can tell from archaeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers. You start seeing the formation of large networks, political, commercial, religious items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, autistic fashions. And this is our secret of success.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This won't help you against the chimpan And similarly, if you want to climb a tree, if you want to do so many things, my bets will be on the chimp, not on Elon.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said that I can do some things better than a chimp, but you know, if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee. You know this one.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us. And not just other human species, other animals too. If you compare me personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better, many other things worse. If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee, an elephant and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the one that comes successful.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things, each time it does both good things and bad things, and the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes. Now, we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors, of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back, we say in the end, everything was okay. Hey, we are here. But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they were just not here.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From history, from new technologies, I'm not so optimistic. We need to think about the failed experiment, which accompanied every major new technology.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was driven by the Industrial Revolution. It was a question how do you build an industrial society? Oh, you build an empire and you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets, and then you had communism. Another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry. And we had all these failed experiments on the way. And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century, with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species. So as a historian, when people talk about the examples”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the Industrial Revolution. Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it will take jobs and bad actors. And in the end, it's okay. And as a historian, my tendency is, yes, in the end, it's okay. But in the end, there is a learning curve, there is a kind of a lot of failed experiments on the way to learning how to use the new technology. And these failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the last really big revolution, the industrial revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies. But on the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, if there was no promise, there was no problem. You know, if this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described, in better medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises. But this is also why it's so dangerous because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there. And it has some dangerous potential also. And we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating banning it. Just to be careful about how we, not so much develop it, but most importantly how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question. And, you know, you look back at history. And one of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, you know, AI, we've been here before.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which in many ways is much, much more dangerous and scary. Already the machines for grabbing attention, we've seen how much social and political damage they could do when kind of distorting the public conversation. Machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships, this is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't regulate it, if we don't train ourselves to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged. Oh, I need to grab this person's attention, you can program the AI to have 17, exactly 17% in attention, not one percentage more or less, or it can by trial and error, discover what is the ideal percentage. Again, you can create Over the last 10 years, we have created machines for grabbing people's attention. This is what has been happening on social media.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But even that, I mean, the thing is if social scientists and psychologists establish that, I don't know, 17% inattention”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side, because the one thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all their attention on me. Like I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians, listen to me, listen to what I feel. And they often don't. And now you have this entity which a hundred percent of its attention is just on what I feel. And this is a huge, huge temptation, and I think also a huge, huge danger.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions. You're saying something and I'm not really listening to you because there is something I want to say and I'm just waiting until you finish I can put in a word or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever that I don't pay attention to what you're feeling. This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships. And computers don't have this problem. Because they don't have any emotions of their own. So, you know, when a computer is talking to you, it can be the most, it can focus 100% of its attention is on what you're saying and what you're feeling because it has no feelings of its own. And paradoxically, this means that computers can fool people into feeling that there is a...”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was built to accomplish that. We are designing again, you know, all these arguments between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past go, all entities evolve by natural selection. The funny thing is, but when you look to the future, more and more entities will come out of intelligent design, not of some God above the clouds, but of our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds, they will design more and more entities. And this is what is happening with AI. It is designed to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans. And in many ways it's already doing it almost better than human beings in some situations. You know, when two people talk with one another, one of the things that kind of”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AIs and are therefore almost irresistible, it's almost irresistible. They are compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities. And I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take this into account. That even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point, the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of this social convention.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or pigs. Now, pigs are far more Why do you think of your dog as conscious but not of the bacon that you buy? Because you've built a relationship with the dog and you don't have a relationship with the bacon. Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness. They are a social test. The Turing test is a social test. It's not a logical proof. Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity when you are invested in it emotionally, you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious. And when it comes again to AI and computers, I think, again, I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms, because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves. We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our subjective consciousness. We have, we cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world, any other human being, our parents, our best friends, we don't have proof that they are conscious. You know, this has been known for thousands of years. This is Descartes. This is Buddha, this is Plato. We can't have this sort of proof. What we do have is social conventions. It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious. It also applies to animals. Most people who have pets firmly believe that their pets are conscious, but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The aliens are here, they are just not from outer space. AI, which is usually stands for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien type of intelligence. It solves problems, attains goals in a very, very different way, in an alien way from human beings. I'm not implying that AI came from out of space. It came from Silicon Valley. But it is alien to us if there are alien intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space already here. I've not seen any evidence for it. It's not impossible. But in science, evidence is everything.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness? Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon? Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know, maybe. But again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness. Can computers eventually become conscious, even though they are not organic? The jury is still out on that. I don't know. I mean, we have to take both options into account”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be, but we don't know yet. Again, we have examples, certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know, plants are not conscious, yet they are intelligent. They can solve problems. They can attain goals in very sophisticated ways. The other way around to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably impossible. But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible. A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry. We know on this planet only about carbon-based lifeforms, whether you're an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But other types of intelligence, certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent, and as far as we know, they have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you at chess or go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy. If it loses, it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals. And to win a chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them. We solve problems. We attain goals by having feelings.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suppose there should be some statistically, but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that, you know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet. And look what we're doing. So intelligence also tends to be sort of destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.”
2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source