Yuval Noah Harari - Making Sense of a World in Crisis

Hello and welcome to the How-To Academy podcast, the Bowie-Klee show from London's home of Big Thinking, I'm Vaz Christodulu. The historian and philosopher Yvonneua Harari became world famous for telling the epic story of our species in his book Sapiens, but recently he joined us for a live conversation at the Barbecan to turn his attention to the present. We are living through an age of multiple overlapping crises and democracy seems to be imperiled the world over. Yvonneua in Ritalashar to offer his insights. So let's begin Yvonne with one of my kind of past noles difficulties I would say at the moment, which is the sheer piece of events that we're living through. Can you actually feel a little bit overwhelming? Do you feel overwhelmed? Completely. I think history is accelerating and this is one of the things that everybody is feeling in whatever sphere of activity. And there are several causes for it, but I think the deepest cause is that we are seeing its part of the clash between organic and non-organic systems in the world. We human beings, we are organisms, we are animals, and like all organisms, we work by cycles, day and night, summer and winter, times of activity, and times of rest and sleep. And this has been like for ages, for billions of years. Now increasingly our society, our economy, our politics is being taken over by non-organic agents, non-organic entities, algorithms, AIs. And the thing about non-organic entities is that they don't work in cycles, they don't need to rest, they don't need to sleep, they don't have families, they don't go on vacation, and to give maybe an extreme but an important example, if you think for instance about Wall Street, the stock exchange. Traditionally the stock exchange was open from 9.30 in the morning, I think, until 4.00 o'clock in the afternoon, Mondays to Fridays, that's it. Because investors and brokers and bankers, they're also human. They also have families, they often want to rest and to sleep. Now as the financial system is being taken over by algorithms and AIs, they're all the time active. If you take a vacation, if you rest, you're only being left behind, you cannot afford that. And the same is happening in the media, and the same is happening in politics. Now previously also politics worked by cycles, and if you are, I don't know, Henry VIII, and you're riding somewhere from London to York, on the way nobody can reach you. Nobody, even if there is a law in France or whatever, they can't reach you. So you have time off. Now nobody has time off. And this is destructive. Well if you force an organism to be active all the time, it goes mad and eventually collapses and dies. So what do you do? How do you switch off? What's the secret? Well, it's a long conversation. Luckily for me, I'm not a politician. I don't envy them. I'm not really a media personality either. I'm one of the last professions as a scholar, as a historian, that I am allowed to kind of take things more slowly. And I also have a team of 20 people who are headed by my husband who are managing everything and answering all the emails and taking care of social media and so forth. So it's a bit tricky there also. So let's tap into some of those big thoughts then, yes, the pace of change is enormous. Let's talk about America to begin with. We've seen this extraordinary response to the shooting of Charlie Kirk, who I have to confess I didn't really know who he was until he was shot, but clearly an enormous figure in the States and has become a big figure for some people in this country too. What do you think that event and the election of Trump, the reaction of the Republicans? What does it tell us about where we are, where the US is in its political state? It's at the crucial moment when people completely stop talking and start fighting instead, which is extremely extremely dangerous, which is why also the disassassination should be condemned very clearly without any butts and ifs and whatever. It would be very clear if people can't talk, they shoot, they fight. And we do not want to go in that direction. It should be also very clear and we know that, say from the history of the 20th century, that political violence on the far left can be as dangerous as on the far right. And this does not justify, you know, persecuting people who have nothing to do with the assassination, but it is a very, very dangerous moment politically. And it actually ties back to what we talked earlier about this shift from humans to algorithms because you also see it in the public conversation that we are in such a strange paradox if you think about it. We have the most sophisticated information and communication technology in the history of the world and we can no longer talk with each other. Something very scary and bizarre is happening. Why is it? You can pick up the phone and talk with somebody on the other side of the planet, but at the same time, the conversation between neighbors, between colleagues is collapsing. People cannot agree on the most basic facts. People cannot, they can talk or write, but they can't listen. You know, a conversation is not just talking. It also has an important bit of listening and this is disappearing. Nobody knows for sure what is happening, but a lot of evidence points, again, in the direction of the technology of the algorithms, that most human communication today is mediated by these non-human entities, by these non-human agents, if you think about the media, so who are the most important editors in today's media? In the 20th century, the editors of the big newspapers, of the television, of the radio, they are extremely influential people. They shape the conversation. They decided what will people talk about, which is more important than telling people what to think about a particular question, is telling people which questions you should talk about. This was the immense power of editors. And if you ask today, who are the most important editors on the planet? What is their names? They don't have names because they are algorithms. It's the algorithms that edit the news feeds on Facebook, and TikTok, and Instagram, and so forth. And it might not be a pure coincidence that at the moment that we give control of the public conversation to non-human agents, the conversation is collapsing. But isn't there a chicken and egg thing here? Because if we talk about, so let's take the case of immigration, right? There's something the people are talking about on both sides of the Atlantic. People also talk about clickbait, which is, in a sense, what you're saying, people click on these stories, the algorithm keeps churning them out. As human agency involved there, we are choosing to look at these stories, and that, to some extent, is driving the agenda. You can't put it all down to technology, can you? Humans are interacting with the technology and driving the conversation in a particular direction. Oh, absolutely. Humans are still involved. But one of the things that is happening is that technology learns our weaknesses. Some people fear that AI will take over when it overwhelms us in our most important abilities and fields. But actually AI is taking over by, first of all, overwhelming our weaknesses. The same way that you hack the code of a computer, or a bank account, or a phone, you go over the code and you look for the weakness and you use that to hack the system. It's the same with human systems. You go over the code of the human and you look for the weakness. For the things that already make that person extremely angry or extremely fearful or extremely hateful, that's how we'll get them. The algorithm is given a very basic task by their currently human masters, like on platforms like Facebook and TikTok and so forth. Increase engagement. An engagement sounds very good, what doesn't like to be engaged. But engagement simply means the amount of time you spend on the platform and whether you share stories and items with other people. That's engagement. And when the algorithms were given the task of increased user engagement, they experimented on billions of human guinea pigs and they discovered the weakness of these human guinea pigs that the easiest way to grab human attention to make people engaged is to press the hate button. The anger button, the fear button and this is what they have been doing. So yes, humans are still involved but the technology is learning to hack humans, to find our weaknesses and manipulate us with that. Lots of people would agree that if you like technology, the tech titans have enormous amounts of power. But then you're very pessimistic in your diagnosis for what's going on. Do you think? Not necessarily. I mean, there are some steps that we can take which are not easy. But at least completely legitimate. The first step would be to ban botan algorithms and AI's from impersonating humans. Like if you go online and you receive a message about some story about whatever, you need to know if you are communicating with a human being or with a bot. Now before people raise the issue of free speech, remember that bots don't have free speech. Now if somebody says, you know, if a human invent some hate field conspiracy theory, I would be very, very careful before I censor that human being. Even when they lie intentionally, it's a very delicate subject and accepting extreme cases, I wouldn't do it. I think that at least to some extent free speech even covers lies. So you take a botanist, first amendment American kind of style and. But let's free speech. Bots don't have free speech. If a human being invented some hateful conspiracy theory and posted it online, that's one problem. If an algorithm then decided to show this conspiracy theory to thousands and millions of other human beings because this drives engagement, this is not covered by free speech. The algorithm is not entitled to that. And it should be technically feasible and completely legal to ban bots from impersonating people and this will go a long way towards easing the problem. Please do this problem. Then we still. One of the key things about public conversations and how they are driven, the most important question is always what is the question? What is the issue that everybody is talking about? And this is the power that we need to exercise very carefully. When I think part of my job as a public intellectual is not necessarily to say what I think about this subject or that subject, but first of all to define what are the most important subjects on the table at the present moment. But given what you're saying about technology, I think it doesn't. There's no evidence right now to suggest that there is any real impetus to even ban bots, not to control in the way that you're describing. Where does that leave democracy? It feels very weak in the face of this particular onslaught. Democracy is very vulnerable to this kind of threat because democracy is a conversation. At the top of that, if you ask yourself what is democracy, it's a conversation, an open conversation. A dictatorship is one person dictating everything. A democracy is a situation when a group of people, a society, a community faces a problem or a set of problems and they come together to have an open conversation to decide what do we do. Now, a conversation demands the ability to converse, to talk and to listen. If it's a group of 20 people, they're all meeting a room or in some clearing in the woods and they talk. How do you create a conversation between 20 million people? Between 200 million people. For most of history, the answer was, you can't, which is why for most of history there were no large scale democracies. We all know of examples of ancient democracies. They all come from small scale societies. With many examples from hunter-gatherer bands and tribes, we have examples from city states, like Athens and Rome and medieval Florence and things like that, they are all at maximum city states. We don't have any example that I know of. Of a large scale country, kingdom, with millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers that is run democratically before the modern era because you just couldn't have a conversation if you don't have printing presses and radio and television and all that. Mass communication technology is not a kind of luxury or side dish that you have democracy and on the side, oh, it's nice, we have television, we have printed newspapers, it's the basis. Before you have that, you do not have large scale democracies built on top of the ability to hold a real time conversation between millions of people. And this is why when there is a major revolution in information technology, it is bound to create an earthquake in democracy. Hopefully, democracy can adjust and adapt because again, the big advantage of democracy compared with dictatorships is that it is the most adaptable system of government because it is an open conversation. So we've seen it before and I hope that after a period of turmoil, the same way the democracy actually became stronger after radio came along and television and the early internet, I hope that in this case, there is no guarantee, it depends on our decisions. But hopefully, democracy will be able again to adapt and to come out even stronger than before. What would you say to those who might argue looking at the example, perhaps of the United States, perhaps of what's going on in Israel and we can talk about that a little bit more, that actually what this level of technology enables is the people in single individuals to accrue power, they're not dictators, but they're perhaps autocrats. Yeah, democracy always has one big problem and this does go back to ancient Athens and ancient Rome. Democracy in the conversation, one of the key questions that is being asked is who should get the power? And in democracy, the agreement is that you never give power to anybody indefinitely, you give it for a limited time period. People agree through this election system or the election system to choose a certain candidate, a certain party and give them power for a limited time, four years, five years, six years, or whatever it is, to try different policies, on condition that after the period is over, they give power back and the people can say, you know what, we made a mistake last time, let's try somebody else this time. This is the deal. And since ancient Athens and Rome, everybody always knew there is a problem in the system. What if you give power to somebody who doesn't want to give it back? You gave them the power, now they have the power, they can use the power to stay in power. They can use the power to, they have four years or five years or whatever, they can use the power in that time to destroy the checks and balances of democracy. And then maybe there are elections after four years, but they are completely rigged. We have examples from Venezuela, to Russia, to North Korea, there are elections in North Korea every four years. Such blockwork. They are so sophisticated, they even know in advance what the results will be. Not, you know, like these primitive people in the West who have to wait until everything is planned. So the problem is how do you give power to somebody without the power to rig the elections and stay in power? And there is no magic solution. This is the whole issue of checks and balances. Oh, we need three codes and we need an independent media, but who is going to regulate the media and who is going to regulate the code and what if there is corruption in code? So it's complicated. You know, dictatorship is simple. And it's one person dictates everything. Democracy is inherently complicated and you need a lot of people with a lot of good will for it to work. And it's not about writing the perfect constitution. And you know, Russia has a wonderful constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and whatever, but it's just a dead piece of paper. Ultimately, it's the spirit of people that determines whether democracy is alive or dead. So it is what you're saying is we've got the political system, the democracy that we actually want. We've got what we deserve. I mean, for better or for worse, and some might say for worse right now. Now, ultimately, you cannot force the people to stay democratic. If people see what certain leaders are doing, if people see what policies they are pursuing and they vote for them, you know, the first time you can say, okay, they didn't know. If it's out in the open and they keep voting for them, ultimately, you cannot force a country to be a democracy. You can force a country to be a dictatorship. And it's like a one way street. I mean, it's easy to slide from a democracy to an autocracy. Once you're an autocracy, if you say, oh, wait a minute, I didn't think it would be like this. I want to go back. Sorry, too late. Once you have crossed a certain threshold, it's almost impossible to go back. And is that what's happening? Do you think so in the United States? So it's very different. It's still a certain, I think that the 2026 and 2028 elections will be crucial. If people who are seeing what is happening, again, with open eyes, they see everything. And if the elections are not rigged, of course, you have the complication maybe within four years, there is enough power or crude to rig the election. But let's say there is a free and a fair moral, less free and fair elections. And after seeing everything, people again vote for the same thing. What can you do? You cannot force a democracy on people who don't want it. Which brings me to the question of Israel and Gaza. What is your view of what is happening there? What is your view of Israel's power, its role, its right to defend itself? Where do you stand? It says the right to defend itself, but not to starve to million people. And it's terrible what is happening there. It's terrible both for the people who live there and for the implications for the entire world. Because the entire world is watching and saying, well, if this can be done there, it can be done in other places as well. So the only place where terrible things are happening in the world. But this is spreading to more and more places. The global order that we have known in the last few decades, which had many, many problems but was still the most peaceful order that humanity has ever managed to create, is collapsing. Because of what Israel is doing in Ukraine, because of what Israel is doing in Gaza, and this is spreading to more and more places. And it will be felt all over the world. Do you think that's something though that is on the minds of Israelis who clearly are very traumatized by the hostage situation, by the events of October the 7th? But do you think they understand the way in which Israel is becoming a symbol of some of that in the same way? Many of them, again, Israel is still a democracy of sorts. It's not a monolith. There are people, sometimes don't realize it, but for the last two years, including during the war, including now, every week, hundreds of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of Israelis go out into the street to demonstrate and to protest. There is still a very strong position to the government, which is now running Israel. There are supposed to be elections next year. We do not know whether there will be free and fair elections. But again, likely elections in the US, they will be decisive for the future of the country. If after everything that happened in the last three years, if there are, it's a big if, if there are three fair elections, and the Israelis again vote for the same government, for the same policies, what can you do? But I hope not. Again, the country is really much more divided than even what you see in the United States. Basically, I would say that roughly half the people hating it on the out like they never hated anybody in their life, and half the people think is the Messiah. There is very little kind of middle ground in between them. The one thing everybody can agree on is that the country is completely divided against itself. And this is again a global phenomenon. You see it in more and more countries around the world. And it's often politicians who present themselves as great patriots who are actually dividing the nation against itself. Because their view of patriotism is not based on love, that to be a patriot is to care and about your compatriots, to love them and to take care of them, their view of patriotism is mostly about hate, about hating foreigners and minorities and so forth. And these types of leaders, like Netanyahu, when they see a wound, a scar in the body of the nation, instead of trying to heal it, they poke the finger into it and try to enlarge it, to open the scars, to open the wound as far as possible, because their political career is based on division, not on nationalism, but actually on tribalism, on dividing the nation into hostile tribes and then presenting themselves as the leader of a tribe within the nation, not of the nation as a whole. And I think part of the antidote to that is to have the healthy kind of nationalism and patriotism, which is not afraid of the flag and is not afraid to admit and to celebrate the achievements of the nation, but which focuses on patriotism as something which is about love and care and not about hate and division. Do you think we live in intense the ideological times when people are really, really attached to a set of ideas and they simply won't let go in a way that perhaps wasn't true 20, 30 years ago? It's hard to say because in many cases you don't see clear-cut ideologies. We are more in a kind of medieval situation when people are attached to personalities and tribes and not to ideologies. This is especially true in cases of leaders like Trump, but one of his strengths as a politician, as a politician as a president, is that he is not bound by any ideology. He can say something and say the exact opposite tomorrow and his base is with him. He can do something and then do the exact opposite tomorrow and his base is with him because it's like a king. They support the person, not any ideology behind the person. Some people describe Trump as conservative. As far as ways you can get from a conservative, whether it's about perceptions of tariffs and free trade or about the deep conservativeism to be conservative is about conserving. It's about respecting traditions, institutions. This is kind of traditional burky and conservatism. What he is doing is to destroy traditions and institutions. And again, it goes back to medieval kind of politics that you mistrust institutions and instead you trust a personality of somebody who is almost divinely elected or superhuman. And then it also ties back to what we talked in the beginning about AIs and algorithms. It ties to this crisis of trust or deficit of trust in human institutions. Then in one field after the other, you see that people are losing trust in institutions. The only thing that gains trust is algorithms and these human kings. If you think for instance about banking, the example we started with. So the rise of cryptocurrencies as a phenomenon is about people losing trust in the human institution of banks and fleshing blood bankers and instead putting their trust in algorithmic money. Money which is created and supported and guaranteed by algorithms. So it's not that trust completely disappears from the system. It shifts from humans to algorithms. The same thing is happening in the media. Again, people have all these kind of fears and doubts about traditional media. Oh, I don't trust the editors, the owners of the newspapers. But I do trust the algorithm that is running my social media feed. Well, is it that people trust or they just don't appreciate the extent which they're being manipulated? It doesn't matter. Trust is not about what you say. It's mainly about what you do. If you go on an airplane, you can all the way talk about how you are afraid of flying and you don't trust the airline. You're on the airplane. By your own action, you have shown that you trust the engineers who build the airplane and you trust the pilot. So if you say that you don't trust anybody but you're constantly scrolling, whatever it is, you're trusting this. And this now gets enormous trust. So the big picture of what is happening now in the all over the world is trust is being shifted from human beings and human institutions to algorithms and to AIs, which is why I think that one of the biggest political questions of the present moment that should be at the heart of every election campaign, every political debate is do we want to recognize AIs as legal persons? Sounds very strange and alien. So I'll try to explain what it means. AIs are now becoming agents. They're agents in the sense that they can make decisions by themselves and they can invent new ideas by themselves. They can learn and change independently. Yes, humans originally designed them, at least for now, but the AI can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself, which means it has agency. Do we want these AIs to be recognized also as legal agents? For example, to be able to open a bank account and be an actor in the financial system, to trade, to buy, sell, hire people, fire people, donate? Do we want AIs to have social media accounts, which they all what they have because all these millions of bots? But do we want AIs to be recognized as legal persons? Now I'm not sure about the situation in the US, in some in the UK, but in the US there is already an open legal path for AIs being recognized as legal persons, which means that according to the law, they are persons with rights. And this path is by incorporating AIs because according to the US legal system, corporations are legal persons. Persons are entities. Persons. This is the language of the law. For instance, there was a famous case in 2010, I think, of the citizen united ruling of the US Supreme Court, which says that corporations are legal persons and therefore they have freedom of expression. It goes back to our initial discussion of it. Why? It was meant to defend the ability of corporations to give donations to politicians. Because if a corporation, if Google or whatever is giving a donation to a politician, this is freedom of expression and freedom of speech. And if a corporation is a person, then the US constitution guarantees that all persons have freedom of expression. Now until today, all of this was just legal fiction, make believe, because even though corporations were recognized as legal persons and they can open bank accounts in higher people and lobby politicians and higher lawyers and whatever, in practice, all decisions of every corporation on earth were made by human beings. If a corporation decided to hire somebody or fire somebody or donate money or invest in something, it was always the decision of some human executive engineer, accountant, shareholder, something, there was nothing on earth other than humans that could do it. Now there is. You can technically now incorporate an AI and the AI can manage the corporate bank account, the AI can decide to buy things, to invest in something, to hire a lawyer and to sue somebody. It is now technically possible to do that. Do we as a society want to allow it legally, politically? And remember that the original reason for the US to give this decision was to allow corporations to donate money to politicians. What do you think about the situation in which an incorporated AI had made billions of dollars by trading in cryptocurrency, let's say? And it's now the richest person in the country and it is donating money to politicians in order for these politicians to advance more rights for AI. This sounds like a kind of crazy science fiction scenario, but this is becoming a completely realistic scenario. Is anybody talking about it in your mind? Is anybody willing to put up a red flag and say no, this cannot be a lie? You don't even see the beginning of the conversation, but there are still no clear party lines. What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans on this view that AI should be recognized as legal persons? You would think on the one hand that say Republicans because they are all in favor of less regulation, free trade, so forth, they will be in favor of recognizing AI as legal persons. On the other hand, many of their members are religious evangelists, Christians, and so forth, and they have a strong commitment to the value of humanity. So the idea of recognizing not just non-humans, but non-organic entities as persons, it might be much more difficult for the religious right. So we actually see the beginning of a battle within the Republican Party, within Manga, exactly between these two camps. And this is not left versus right. In traditional terms of left versus right, it's very difficult to know what is a left wing and what is a right wing position. Well, is it even helpful to talk in those terms now? I think people are talking less and less in these terms because the conversation is really shifting to new territories. And in terms of then the political battlegrounds, you've said, if describes this debate around AI and how we consider it a moral and philosophical question in many ways, whether we can personify AI, why aren't we having those conversations? Why are we having the wrong conversations? What would be on your agenda? What would be on the Yuval manifesto? And it's partly there are political interests in focusing on the conversation on certain issues and not others. There are technological interests. Again, increasingly it's the algorithms that decide what the humans will be talking about. Partly, it's a legacy of evolution. Politics is a very emotional thing. It's not an intellectual thing. In elections, people are not asked what is the truth. They are asked what do you feel? People vote according to their emotions, their desires. And we are programmed by evolution to get very engaged, very excited about certain things that were very prominent in the African savannah when we evolved there hundreds of thousands of years ago and not about other things. So people from the other tribe are coming to our territory. This is very engaging. But something like climate change wasn't engaging 200,000 years ago because it was just completely irrelevant. The actions of Stone Age hunter-gatherers did not change, at least not significantly, at the Earth's ecology. So there was no reason for the human mind, for the human limbic system, for the human emotional system to evolve, to care about such things. And we are still basically the same bodies and minds we were tens of thousands of years ago in the savannah. So it's very easy to get us engaged, emotional, excited about the things that were very relevant 50,000 years ago, which some of them could still be relevant. I'm not saying the immigration is not important. It is a very important subject. But it's much easier to get people engaged in that debate than in other debates, which might be just as important in the long run, maybe far more important. And then even the AI question, can be presented in terms of immigration. You know, if you ask people or concern about immigration, what is your biggest concerns? What are your biggest fears? They would usually tell you, we are afraid that these people will take out jobs, that they will change the culture. They are coming with different cultural ideas, and they will change the culture here. And they might take over politics. These are the three main fears, I think. And my question is, okay, why aren't you concerned about the digital immigration? There is a wave of millions of AI immigrants infiltrating the country. They are not coming in boats in the middle of the night. They are coming through cables and screens and satellites. They are traveling at the speed of light. They don't need visas. They are not stopped at any border. And they are increasingly going to take a lot of jobs. Yes, they will create new jobs, the same way that human immigrants also sometimes create new jobs. And be a huge, huge upheaval in the job market. They come with very different ideas about culture. They are changing culture in a very fast and alien way. And they are already taking over politics. At least some of the most important political positions in the country have already fallen into their hands. Again, who are the most important news editors in the UK today? They are not people and they are not in the UK. They are algorithms across the sea. I suspect some of my former bosses might take a bridge at that. No, it's crucial. And people think that the first jobs that will be lost are taxi drivers. But some of the first jobs that have already been lost are some of the most powerful jobs in the country. And I think we've just heard that Albania is appointed an AI to be a minister. I think just in the last few years, I don't know to what extent this is a gimmick or a serious thing. But certainly what is very serious is that in warfare, life and death decisions in Gaza, in Ukraine, elsewhere, has increasingly taken by AI. This is no longer a science fiction. This is the face of warfare in the second half of the 2020s. Well, on that sobering thought, I have your questions which haven't been looked through by an algorithm but some technology is involved. So there's a question here. A lot loads of questions and I'm going to scroll through them. I'm going to go through them as quickly as I can. And a normalist question, as a fellow technology skeptic, do you think that democracy can survive polarization caused by social media which has given rise to political extremism? Yes, again, democracy is extremely adaptable. This is its strength. And it has faced previous periods of crisis. It's almost always in crisis. In the 1930s, it was in crisis in the 1960s and 70s, also in these previous occasions, partly because of new communication technologies like radio and like television. And democracy have learned how to adapt and adjust and actually became better and stronger as a result. But it's not a guarantee. It depends on decisions that people make. And one example is the decision to about whether algorithms should be recognized as legal persons and whether they can hold social media accounts. At present, the actual situation is that much of social media is run by bots, by algorithms. They are relatively a small percentage of the accounts but they are a very big percentage of the actual traffic. Now this is something that as a society we can agree we do not allow that. And we demand that the platforms, that the big technology companies do something about that either bend the bots or at the very least if a bot is communicating with me, I need to know it's a bot and not a human being. And no arguments about free speech can be accepted because bots don't have freedom of speech. So we talked about right and left, perhaps being irrelevant but an interesting question bearing that in mind. In era where the right is winning big thanks to a populist and loud approach, what concrete steps can the left take? Should it lower itself the words of the questioner to the same level? I'm not sure what lowering to the same level would mean in this context but politics is to a large extent about what are the things people talk about. If the main subject that decides the election is integration then the far right will win. The question is what do people think of the biggest problems facing the country, facing society? And if you remember for instance the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the only thing almost anybody remembers from that debate is Trump remark about the cats and dogs. And it was extremely effective because it got people to talk about immigration. It doesn't matter how, if you get people to talk about it, if this is the topic of the conversation then this decides who will win. And the issue in politics is very often that people are not talking about the most important problems and how to dominate the agenda. And we saw it in the UK for instance with Brexit that for five years the country almost lost its mind and lost so much time and money and effort debate in question that almost ten years later the main thing I think people can say about it, it wasn't very important because it didn't bring any results. Even the people who supported it in expect a bit will make a big change. What big problem that the UK had in 2015 was actually solved by it? Many of the problems that supporters of Brexit promised will be solved are again the problems they are talking about now. Although it is the intangible question of sovereignty which is not something that's not a problem, it's an idea, it's a concept. Again there are many many, does God exist? In the fourth century late Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire questions about the nature of Christ, the relation between God the Father and God the Son, are they the same, are they not the same? This was one of the most important questions in society. If you travel back to 17th century England and so one of the most important questions is whether the Catholics of the Protestants are right about Christianity, what Christian dogma? If you go to Germany people were mass occurring each other by the million in the 30th years war, Catholics were versus Protestants. Did they decide the question? No. When Germany goes to election in a few years, is the question of who is right, Catholics and Protestants, should it be the main something that people discuss? Probably not. Because there are more urgent things to discuss. So far is that if we mention Germany, one and another kind of key question that is not being discussed enough in the UK, in Europe is for instance, should Germany have nukes? You know, if you're a German today, you ask yourself this question very seriously, because you say to yourself, we need deterrence against the Russians. Generally it was the Americans, but obviously we can't trust the Americans anymore, who knows what they will do if the Russians come? So this leaves us with the French and the British. If say in a couple of years, Le Penis president of France, Farage's prime minister of Britain, do you really want to trust the sovereignity of Germany, the independence and security of Germany to these two individuals? If not, maybe we need our own nukes. So a question that should be asked to Farage to Le Pen and to every other politician, what is your position on Germany having a nuclear program? If you don't like it, what is your plan? What kind of security guarantees and what kind of European network alliance are you willing to commit to to reassure the Germans that no, no, no, no, no, you don't need your own nukes, you can rely on us. And this is a conversation that is hardly happening, but that's the conversation of nuance. That is it, that's the conversation which involves nuance. The conversations we're having now, it involves a lot of emotions, Germans, nukes, there is a lot of emotions involved. There's a liberty, Germany, the audience. And I'm not saying it is a criticism. I think in Germany today there is a case to be made that given the political climate in the US, France and Britain, Germany needs to think seriously about this issue. And it involves a lot of emotions and a lot of very difficult memories. And again, the question is what do people talk about? Why don't they talk enough about these subjects? It's like the interesting take, not something we've heard you talked about at all. AI has the potential to make languages obsolete and communication thus seamless. What might our world look like when language barriers disappear altogether? That's a good question, I mean, we do see that AI is mastering language. Which is a crucial historical development because language was the tool with which our species conquered the world. Homostampians took over the world not because we are individually smarter or more powerful than chimpanzees or elephants, but because we could organize better and we could organize better because we had the most sophisticated language on the planet. And everything we've built is ultimately built on language, on stories. This is the operating system of banks and religions alike, in the beginning was the word. And the word is now made not flesh, it is made silicone. AI is becoming better at language than human beings. And I say it as an author, as a writer, I'm actually working now on a new book. I have a 50% bet with myself that this is probably my last book because afterwards AI will take over, that I will not be able to compete with AI in writing books. Heavens, that's a very big kind of statement. You just don't think you can come up with ideas that AI can't come up with. I think about what I do, I read a lot, I can read a lot more than I can, much faster. And remember everything that's really unlike me, I find patterns in what I read. It's but you're human, you've lived, you've had a bad day, you've had a good day, you've had a headache. That's not language. Language is different. I mean we have experience in human history, there was always this deep tension between language and experience, you know, like in Taoism, the Tao that can be expressed in words is not the real Tao. Followed in all the tradition, there are places language cannot reach. And these are the most important things about us. But at the level of social construction, at the level of banks and religions and armies, it's the language that matters. It's the Holy Scriptures, it's the manuals, it's the laws, it's the constitutions, they are made of language. And something now appeared on earth, which is better at language than we are. And you think about, you know, something like a traditional religion. Religions that are based on text are in great Jupiter, Jupiter, of being taken over by AI very soon, if I think for instance about Judaism. So in Judaism, ultimate authority is given at least in Orthodox Judaism, not to human beings and not to human experiences, but to a text. Now like with corporations, until today, this was a kind of fiction. Because the text, the Holy text, could not actually speak and because people had questions about the text and the text couldn't answer, so authority was actually in the hands of the experts on the text, the rabbis. They read the text and they interpreted it. And over thousands of years, they wrote commentaries and commentaries and commentaries and commentaries and to be a rabbi, you needed to read as many of these religious texts as possible and remember. Now, no human was a actual, no rabbi is able to read all the texts of Judaism and remember them, AI can. For the first time in the history of Judaism, there is an entity that can read every single text written by every rabbi in Yemen or Poland in the 17th century. For every word, understand the linguistic context of every word. What's the difference between 17th century edition, 15th century edition? This word was used like this here, but this word was used differently there and will be the authority, the highest authority on the text. It will actually be a text that can speak back to you. What happens to a religion of texts when the texts begin to speak? So wouldn't you, the believer, want that maybe it's the rabbi that asks the question to chat GPT, but don't I, the believer, want to hear the answer from the rabbi? Because in the end, the rabbi has the lived experience, the AI doesn't. This is maybe Buddhism, but not Judaism. Judaism, it's text. It is written here in Doctrine 1 of me, chapter 3 verse 7, it says, blah, blah, blah. You can't say yes, but my experience says differently. You want to say this, go be a Buddhist. Well, I was toying with it to ask you this question, but I feel it's very relevant now. Given that you just told us your next but it might be your last, what is your purpose in life? Do you think it will change? And if so, how do you anticipate it will change? I don't think in terms of purposes, I try to understand life. And I think one of the most misleading things about life is that the human mind tends to think in stories, but reality is not a story. We constantly try to impose a story on reality, and of course, with ourselves as very important heroes at the center of the narrative, and this is just reality doesn't work like that. So as long as we keep being attached to these ideas of what is the story of the universe, what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of life, if guarantees that we misunderstand what life actually is. Asya says, "In sapiens, you argue that shared myths, unified societies, are there any positive, sustainable myths that can now now? The clen, unify us now." At the present moment, the most important level to go back to is the biological level. That again, the world is taking over by a non-organic, non-biological network, which is not even necessarily, it has enormous positive promises as well, but ultimately it is not organic, it is not biological. And we need to go back to the level ultimately of the body. Our minds divide us because our minds keep inventing stories that we are different from them. On the level of the body, we are almost exactly the same. And this was always important to know in history, but it is especially important to know now when we live more and more of our lives inside these kind of artificial digital spaces, where the body almost disappears, or biology almost disappears, and it makes it even easier to divide us and turn us against each other. Because when we live in the mind, again, I hold one myth in my mind and you hold a different myth in your mind. It makes us so different. When we go down a little from the level of the mind to the level of the body, we are the same. When we are oxygen, we need water. So I think that to survive and flourish in the 21st century, humanity needs to stay very connected, very rooted in its bodily biological, organic structure. So human contact, get away from these algorithms? Absolutely. That's out of it. But also all these fantasies about living in the clouds and uploading our consciousness to a cloud. This is very ancient fantasies. Again, you see it in religious history, again and again, that people fantasize about escaping the biological body with all its messiness and existing forever in a kind of purely spiritual realm. And this has always been an extremely dangerous fantasy that sometimes caused people to do terrible things to one another. It is doubly dangerous now because at least some people see a path. Previously they told you, "Okay, after you die, you will get it." Now increasingly people want it in their life. And we just tell them, I think a very interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. When the microphone called them, they weren't aware that they are being listened to. What are they talking about? It's not the war in Ukraine, not Gaza. They were talking about extending their life indefinitely, using a new biotechnology. This is what these people ultimately really care about. They want to stay in power forever, for which they first need to live forever. And they think they see a path to accomplishing that. Well, Tamiwa is asking, "Do you think the West is now going to permanently have populist governments?" Everything is permanent in history. Again, history is just accelerating. Nobody has any idea what the political situation will be in five or ten years. And also the thought that the populist or some kind of coherent one thing they are not. And it's very important to realize it. But otherwise you cannot make political alliances. This is ultimately about understanding the other side and finding ways to make compromises and alliances. And if you have a very rigid worldview that the world is just divided into these two blocks that will forever remain separate, it makes you a very bad politician. I think we're trying to get in a couple more if I can. And going to put two questions together, you indicated earlier and forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I think you're quite a free speech. You believe in free speech in the purest sense. But two questions. No, I just don't believe in giving any. I don't trust anybody with the power to forcefully regulate free speech. And when I said that free speech even protects lies, it's because I don't want to give anybody the power to decide what is a lie and what is truth. Because I know from historical experience once you give that power to somebody they will use it not necessarily in ways that you think they will. So it's better to allow some people to lie occasionally than to give some ministry of truth the power to decide, oh this is a lie, you cannot say that. So I think you might have answered one of the questions. But let me ask you the most and you can go away like thoughts on the increasing suppression of freedom of speech seen in developed Western nations such as the UK and the US. And then Charlie asks, can you share your thoughts on Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation and whether it suggests the end of freedom of speech? By itself it's not the end of freedom of speech. It is worrying. But again ultimately the thing to focus on is the algorithms and the bots which are increasingly running the conversation. And it's a question of what do people talk about? The more you talk about the freedom of speech of the humans you are in the old conversation with these kind of first world war fortified trenches. It's very difficult to move even a kilometer. At the same time you have this entire open arena which is maybe the most important battlefield today about conversations speech, free speech which is what do you think about the free speech of AIs and algorithms? Because they are increasingly running the show. Okay and on a really potentially I think it could be yes it is an optimistic end. Nicole in a world of crisis what gives you hope? And humanity has done the impossible so many times before and that one of the key lessons of history is that most humans are trustworthy. Most humans are well meaning otherwise we wouldn't be here. If the human species was mainly made of psychopaths and liars and untrustrend individuals we would still be kind of tiny bands in the savanna barely able to hold our own against the chimpanzees or the hyenas or the liars. We took over the planet because we have learned to build bigger and bigger networks of cooperation. From a situation when you had a few dozen people living in a tiny band not able to trust anybody outside the band. There you have nations like Britain with tens of millions of citizens. Some nations have hundreds even more than a billion citizens in China and India. Are that cooperate in amazing ways when you look at it from the viewpoint of the stone age or even of the middle ages. We have networks of cooperation that extend beyond nations like the global trade network that so much of the food we eat of the clothes we wear of the medicines that keep us alive they are invented, grown, produced by complete strangers on the other side of the world. So humans have been able to build immense amount of trust and this was only possible because most humans are trustworthy. This is the main source for hope also now as we see this deficit of trust or this collapse of trust that this is not inevitable. This is not objective. This is not because there is something wrong with humanity. And there are ways to rebuild this trust. I think that one way, very important and you start on the individual level is to simply have a more charitable approach to the other humans you encounter whether physically or online or wherever. A charitable approach means, you know, like texts we talked earlier about like the Bible. But every sentence in the Bible, you have a hundred different interpretations. Similarly when you meet somebody and they say something or do something, there are usually several different ways you can interpret it. Some people unfortunately, they immediately go for the worst interpretation possible. Like they would listen to what you say and they will think hard what is the worst possible interpretation. I can give to what you just said and that get all upset about it. So don't do that. They have a more charitable approach to what people do and say. Now don't be naive. If you have evidence, there are some bad people out there definitely. If you have evidence that somebody is a bad actor, don't trust and don't fall for their manipulations and lies. But this should not cause us to be inherently suspicious towards every human being and everything that happens on the planet. I will let you on a secret. I've met quite a few politicians in recent years and even most of them are, good and trustworthy people with very, very difficult jobs that I don't envy, not all of them, but many of them. And we should also have the same approach, the same attitude to them because we need good politicians, we need good people to go into politics. And the more trust that we have towards people that we spread in the world, the better the world will be. On that very positive note, I'm glad to say Yvonne O'Harrari, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. This episode starred Yvonne O'Harrari and was presented by Ritala Shah. It was produced by Nicole Wong and our editor is John Doughty. Until next time, I'm fast-Christian Ulu. Thanks for listening. [Music]