Making Sense of a World in Crisis | Yuval Noah Harari

Good evening and welcome everyone. It's wonderful to see the Barbin Hall packed tonight when we're going to be discussing the state of the world, ideas, politics, history with a man who I think has given us all a fair bit to chew on over time. Who hasn't read Sapiens in this hall? I bet there's not many of you.

Um, Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and a best-selling author. His books have sold 50 million copies in 65 languages around the world and he's considered one of the world's leading public intellectuals today. I'm delighted to say that we can tap into some of that wisdom tonight. Good evening. Welcome Yuval. It's wonderful to have you here. I'll be chatting with you for the next 50 minutes and we will have time for your questions at the end which I hope you've already been submitting.

So let's begin. You've all with one of my kind of personal difficulties, I would say, at the moment, which is the sheer pace of events that we're living through. It can actually feel a little bit overwhelming. Do you feel overwhelmed?

Um, completely. I, 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 it's part of the clash between organic and non-organic systems in the world. We human beings, uh, 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 that, you know, 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, uh, traditionally the stock exchange was open from 9:30 in the morning, I think, until 4:00 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 being left behind. You cannot afford that. And the same is happening in the media. And the same is happening in politics. No, 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. No, even if there is a war in France or whatever, they can't reach you. So you have time off. Now nobody has time off.

This is true. And this is destructive because 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?

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. Uh, I'm, 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, it's, it's a bit tricky there also.

So let's tap into some of those big thoughts then. Yes, the pace of change is, is enormous. Let's talk about America to begin with. Uh, 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. Mhm.

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 a crucial moment when people completely stop talking and start fighting instead, which is extremely, extremely dangerous. Which is why also this assassination should be condemned very clearly, without any buts and ifs and and whatever. It should be very clear. If people can't talk, they should they fight. And we do not want to go in that direction. And it should be also very clear. And we know that say from the history of the 20th century that, uh, uh, political violence on the far left can be as dangerous as on the far right. Uh, and this does not justify, um, you know, persecuting people who have nothing to do with the assassination. But it is, 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 an, it, it's, it's 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 that, you know, you can pick up the 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 all right, 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, uh, uh, entities, by these non-human agents. If you think about the media, so who are the most important editors in today's media? You know, in the 20th century, the editors of the big newspapers, of the television, of the radio, they're extremely influential people. They shaped 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. And 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, but isn't there a chicken and egg thing here? Because if we talk about, so let's take the case of immigration, right? It's something that people are talking about on both sides of the Atlantic. People also talk about clickbait, which is in a sense what you're saying. The, you know, people click on these stories, the algorithm keeps churning them out. There's 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 the technology learns our weaknesses. Some people fear that AI will take over when it overwhelms us in our, uh, uh, uh, most important abilities and fields. But actually, AI is taking over by first of all, uh, uh, overwhelming our weaknesses. You know, the same way that you hack the code of a computer or a bank account or a phone, you, 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 algorithms were given a very basic task by their currently human masters, like on platforms like Facebook and TikTok and so forth: increase engagement. And engagement sounds very good. Who 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 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, uh, uh, manipulate us with that.

Lots of people would agree that if you like technology, that the tech titans have enormous amounts of power. But then you're very pessimistic in your, 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 are at least completely legitimate. The first step would be to ban bots from imper ban bots and algorithms and AIs 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 invents some conspiracy, hate-filled conspiracy theory, I would be very, very careful before I censor that human being. Censoring human beings, silencing human beings, even when they lie, even when they lie intentionally, it's a very delicate subject, and except in extreme cases, I wouldn't do it. I think that at least to some extent, free speech even covers lies.

So you take a First Amendment, American kind of style attitude.

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, uh, it should be technically feasible and completely legal to ban bots from impersonating people. And this will go a long way towards, uh, uh, easing the problem, at least this problem. And 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. I mean, 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, but given what you're saying about about technology, I think it doesn't, there's no evidence right now to suggest that there is any real impetus to, to, to even ban bots, to control in the way that you're describing.

Where does that leave democracy? It feels very, um, weak in the face of this particular onslaught.

Democracy is very vulnerable to this kind of threat because democracy is a conversation at bottom. 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, so okay, they all meet in a room or in, in, 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. We have 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, 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 could not, you just couldn't have a conversation. If you don't have printing presses and radio and television and all that, 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 democracy. It's built on top of the ability to hold a, a, 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, uh, adjust and adapt because again, the, the big advantage of democracy compared with say, 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 that democracy actually became stronger after radio came along and television and the early internet, I hope that in this, again, 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.

But 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 for people in single individuals to accrue power. They're not dictators, but they're perhaps autocrats.

Yeah. Democracy always had one big problem, and this does go back to ancient Athens and ancient Rome. Um, democracy in, 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, uh, election system or that election system to choose a certain candidate, a certain party, and give them power for a limited time, four years, five years, six years, however 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 however, 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, like clockwork. 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 the, everything is planned. So the, the, 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 free courts, and we need an independent media, but who is going to regulate the media? And who is going to regulate the court? And what if there is corruption in court? So, it's complicated. You know, dictatorship is simple. Again, it's one person dictates everything. Democracy is inherently complicated, and you need a lot of people with a lot of goodwill for it to work. Again, 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 a democracy is alive or dead.

So, in a sense, what you're saying is, we've got the political system, the democracy that we actually want. We've got what we deserve.

Mhm.

I mean, for better or for worse. And some might say for worse right now.

You know, ultimately, you cannot force a 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 in autocracy, if you say, "Oh, wait a minute. I didn't, I, 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, say, in the United States?

United States is still a certain. I think that the, the 2026 and 20, 2028 elections will be crucial. Uh, 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, uh, there, there is enough power accrued to rig the elections. But let's say there is a free and fair, more or 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 on this?

It has a right to defend itself, but not to starve two million people. Um, 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. It's not the only place where terrible things are happening in the world, but this is spreading to more and more places. Uh, 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 is Russia 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, uh, 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?

Some of them. Again, Israel is still a democracy of sorts. Uh, it's not a monolith. There are people, sometimes people 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, some hundreds of thousands of Israelis go out into the street to demonstrate and to protest. There is still a very strong opposition, uh, uh, to the government which is now running Israel. Uh, there was supposed to be elections next year. We do not know whether there will be free and fair elections. Uh, but again, like the elections in the US, they will be decisive for the future of the country. If after everything that happened in the last, uh, uh, uh, three years, if there are, it's a big if, if there are free and 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 hate Netanyahu like they never hated anybody in their life, and half the people think he's the messiah. There is very little kind of middle ground, uh, uh, 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, 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 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 of leaders like Netanyahu, when they seeing 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, 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, uh, but which focuses on patriotism on as as something which is about love and care and not about hate and division.

Do you think we live in intensely 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. Uh, we are more in a kind of a medieval situation when people are attached to personalities and tribes and not to ideologies. This is especially true in cases of leaders like Trump. One of his strengths as a politician, as a politician, as a president, is that he's 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. And, you know, some people describe Trump as, I don't know, conservative. He's as far away as you can get from a conservative, whether it's about, uh, uh, perceptions of tariffs and and free trade, or about the very, the deep conservatism. To be a conservative is about conserving, is about respecting traditions, institutions. This is kind of traditional Burkean conservatism. And what he is doing is to destroy traditions and institutions. And again, it goes back to a medieval kind of politics that you mistrust institutions and instead you trust a personality of somebody who is almost divinely elected or or or superhuman. And again, 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.

Um, if you think for instance about banking, the example we started with. So the rise of cryptocurrencies for, as, as, as, as, as, as a phenomenon is about people losing trust in the human institution of banks and bankers, flesh and 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, of, 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 to 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, all, 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 built 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 again, 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, I'll try to, to explain what, 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. Uh, but the AI can learn and change by, 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, uh, h be an actor in the financial system, to trade, to buy, sell, uh, uh, hire people, fire people, donate? Um, do we want AIs to have social media accounts, which they already have because of 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, sorry, 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, uh, uh, the US legal system, corporations are legal persons, persons or entities.

Persons. This is the, the, the language of the law. For instance, there was a famous case in 2010, I think, of the Citizens United ruling of the US Supreme Court, which says that corporations are legal persons and therefore they have freedom of expression. Goes back to our initial discussion of why it was meant to defend the ability of corporations to give donations to politicians. Because if a corporation, if, 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 and hire people and lobby politicians and hire 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, uh, sue somebody. It is now technically possible to do that. Do we as a society want to allow it, uh, legally, politically? Again, 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 a 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, uh, 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 allowed"?

Hardly. You don't even see the beginning of a. You see the beginning of a conversation, but there are still no clear party lines. Like, what is the difference between Democrats and Republicans on this view that, uh, 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, uh, uh, uh, 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, I think people are talking less and less in, in these terms because the conversation is really shifting to new territories. And in terms of then the political battlegrounds, you've said you've described this, 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, the Yuval manifesto?

And it's partly, uh, there are political interests in focusing 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 of what we, I mean, politics is a very emotional thing. It's not an intellectual thing. In elections, people are not asked, uh, uh, 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, the, uh, 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 that 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. Again, even the AI question can be presented in terms of immigration. You know, if you ask people who are concerned 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 our 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. There'll 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 and an 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, uh, take umbrage at that.

It's, it's crucial. And people think that, you know, that the first jobs that will be lost are, I don't know, 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 has appointed an AI to be a minister, I think, just in, 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, is increasingly taken by AI. This is no longer science fiction. This is the face of warfare in the second half of the 2020s.

Well, on that sobering thought, uh, I have your questions which haven't been looked through by an algorithm, but some technology is involved. Um, so there's a question here, lot loads of questions, and I'm going to scroll through them. I'm going to go through them as quickly as I can. Uh, an anonymous 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. It was 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. Um, but it will, it's not a, it's, it's not a guarantee. It depends on decisions that people make. And one example is the decision to, uh, 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, uh, uh, do something about that, either ban 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. Now, I think I'm looking at the wrong questions and I'm wondering if, uh, one of my colleagues can come and help me because I don't think they're the questions from this evening. Um, so that was very honest of me when the technology goes really.

Got somebody else's questions. Is there anything good? Um, it was on Fran's questions, I think.

In the hands of technology.

Question. I was looking at the wrong questions, right? Um, although that first one was pretty relevant. There's just lots of questions about New York and I was thinking, no, that this isn't what we want to talk about. Um, okay, so now I'm looking at the right questions. Uh, so we talked about right and left perhaps being irrelevant, but an interesting question bearing that in mind. In an 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, in, in this context, but politics is, is to a large extent about what are the things people talk about. If the main subject that people that decides the election is immigration, then the far right will win. The question is, what is, what do people think are the biggest problems facing the country, facing society? And if you remember, for instance, the debate between, uh, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the only thing almost anybody remembers from that debate is Trump's remark about the cats and dogs.

Yes. 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, uh, 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 debating a question that almost 10 years later, the main thing I think people can say about it, it wasn't very important because it didn't bring any results. Like, even the people who supported it and and expected that it will make a big change, what, what big problem that the UK had in 2015, 15, was actually solved by it? Many of the problems that the supporters of Brexit promised will be solved are again, the, the problems they're talking about now.

Although always the intangible question of sovereignty, which is not something, it's not a problem, it's an idea, it's a concept.

Again, there are always many, many. Does God exist? In the 4th 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, uh, uh, uh, so one of the most important questions is whether the Catholics or the Protestants are right about about Christianity, about Christian dogma. If you go to Germany, people were massacring each other by the million in the 30 Years' War, Catholics 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 subject that people discuss? Probably not, because there are more urgent things to discuss. So, for instance, if we mention Germany, one 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, if you're a German today, you ask yourself this question very seriously because you say to yourself, we need deterrence against the Russians. Traditionally, 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 Pen is president of France, Farage is prime minister of of Britain, do we really want to trust the sovereignty 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 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, uh, network alliance are you willing to commit to to reassure the Germans that, 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 a conversation of nuance. That isn't that's a 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.

Does anybody German in the audience? And I'm not saying it is a criticism. I, I think there 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, it, 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?

Slightly interesting take, not something we've really 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?

Um, 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. Homo sapiens 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 silicon. AI is becoming better at language than human beings. As an all, I, 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, 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 the thing what I do. I read a lot. AI can read a lot more than I can, much faster, and remember everything. It's unlike me. I find patterns in what I read.

Yes. But you're a 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, in, in Daoism, the Dao that can be expressed in words is not the real Dao. Find it in all the tradition, there are places language cannot reach. And these are the, 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 jeopardy, jeopardy 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 on commentaries and commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. And to be a rabbi, you needed to read as many of these religious texts as possible and remember them.

Now, no human was actually a, 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. Remember every word, understand the linguistic context of every word. What's the difference between 17th-century Yiddish and 15th-century Yiddish? And 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?

But wouldn't you, the believer, want that? Maybe it's the rabbi that asks the question to ChatGPT, 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 Deuteronomy 3:7. 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 whether to ask you this question, but I feel it's very relevant now, given that you've just told us your next book 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, again, 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, it guarantees that we misunderstand what life actually is.

Cassia says, "In Sapiens, you argue that shared myths unify societies. Are there any positive sustainable myths that can unify us now?" that can 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 evil, 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 is, 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, where 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. We need oxygen. We need water. So, I think that it's to survive and flourish in the 21st century, humanity needs to stay very connected, very rooted in its bodily, biological, organic structure.

So, human-to-human contact, get away from those algorithms.

Absolutely. That's part of it. But also all these fantasies about, you know, living in the clouds and uploading our consciousness to a cloud. And 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 have, I think, a very interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. When the microphone caught them, they weren't aware that they were being listened to. What were they talking about? Not the war in Ukraine, not Gaza. They were talking about extending their life indefinitely.

Using 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, Tommy is asking, do you think the West is now going to permanently have populist governments?

Nothing is permanent in history. Again, history is just accelerating. Nobody has any idea what the political situation will be in five or 10 years. And also, the thought that the populists are some kind of coherent one thing, they are not. And it's very important to realize that, otherwise, you cannot make political alliances. Politics 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 I'm going to try and get in a couple more if I can. I'm going to and going to put two questions together. You indicated earlier, and forgive me if I'm misinterpreting, that I think you're quite a free speech kind of, 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. Again, 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 them both, and you can go where you'd 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, you know, these kind of First World War fortified trenches, and 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, I'm going to end 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?

That 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 untrustworthy individuals, we would still be kind of tiny bands in the savannah, barely able to hold our own against the chimpanzees or the hyenas or the lions. 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.

Today, 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, 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 an immense amount of trust, and this was only possible because most humans are trustworthy. And 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, that 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 then get all upset about it. So, don't do that.

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 them. 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 and we need good people to go into politics. And the more trust that we have towards people and that we spread in the world, the better the world will be.

Well, on that very positive note, I'm glad to say Yuval Noah Harari, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.