#390 Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies

Over the last ten years, we have created machines for grabbing people's attention ... Now, we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy—which, in many ways, it's much, much more dangerous and scary.

Our species, Homo sapiens, I don't think we'll be around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves ... If we survive, we will probably have so much power that we will change ourselves using various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be Homo sapiens like us; they will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals.

If you never learn how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy peace and quiet, because the way to peace passes through boredom.

I do think that intelligence, in any way, is a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet, and look what we we are doing. So, intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent lifeforms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.

The aliens are here; they are just not from outer space. AI, which 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.

When it comes down to AI and computers, I don't think that, at the present moment, computers are conscious. But people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs ... It's almost irresistible—they're 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.

The conspiracy theories, they do get one thing right, certainly in today's world: I think they represent an authentic and justified fear of a lot of people that they are losing control of their lives; they don't understand what is happening.

AI can create new ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us.

I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way. Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start with is what is suffering? What is causing suffering? ... The most important question about the reality of life is what is suffering, and where is it coming from?

I think one of the biggest success stories in modern history, I would say, is feminism, because feminism believed in the power of stories, not so much in the power of violence, of armed conflict. By many measures, feminism has been maybe the most successful social movement of the 20th century and maybe of the modern age.

I think it's an extremely dangerous development, and the chances that this will go wrong, that people will use the new technologies trying to upgrade humans but actually downgrading them—this is a very, very big danger.

I'm more worried about AI accumulating more and more power and basically taking over society, taking over our lives, taking power away from us until we don't understand what is happening, and we lose control of our lives and of the future.

An AI based on our flawed understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all, to keep developing ourselves. If, for every dollar and every minute that we spent on developing AI, artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness, the human mind will be okay.

Don't engage with the thoughts. The mind is constantly producing stories with words. These stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world.

Pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats ... 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.

AI is the first tool in history that can make decisions by itself.

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.

Money is the most successful story ever told—much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in God or in the same God; everybody, almost everybody, believes in money, even though it's just a figment of our imagination.

If you rewind the movie of history... and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire and the world maybe twice out a hundred times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen.

One of the problematic things I see today in many academic circles is that people focus too much on power. They think that the whole of history, the whole of politics, is just a power structure ... If you think that the whole of history and the whole of politics is only power, then there is no room for conversation.

You will never find the deepest truth in a book; you will never find it in words; you can only find it in, I think, direct experience, which is nonverbal, which is pre-verbal.

The most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult—to keep reinventing ourselves.

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.

If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not, you need to ask, can it suffer?