1068: Yuval Noah Harari | Rewriting Human History in the Age of AI

Highlights

• 2024-11-22 22:01 It’s like a God. If everybody believes in my God, then I’m fine. But if people stop believing in my God, that’s dangerous for me. And it’s the same with my money. My money has value only if other people also believe in it. If you have a private money, it’s just mine. Nobody else believe in this money. It’s worthless. You can’t anything.

• 2024-11-22 20:55 They connect the resources of strangers. The bank takes my resources and I trust my bank.

• 2024-11-22 20:57 You know, history of physics, whatever, because you need to do research, you need to gather evidence, you need to evaluate the evidence.

• 2024-11-22 20:59 Whereas the truth is, again, occasionally painful. Fiction can be made as pleasant and attractive as you would like it to be.

• 2024-11-22 21:00 The key question you ask in elections is not what is the truth? The question is, what do you want? And when you ask, what do you want?

• 2024-11-22 21:59 I studied history. I studied for 10 years. What do you do when you study history in university? You don’t memorize dates and names of kings and battles and whatever. No, for 10 years you learn how to look for evidence and how to evaluate evidence

• 2024-11-22 21:59 You do find documents saying they had a million soldiers. The size of the armies was about a few thousand or a few tens of thousand. So how do you evaluate

• 2024-11-22 21:59 But be very suspicious of the numbers you read in chronicles, which might be inflated. It’s better to rely on payment documents, like when you write a chronicle, you invent any figure you like. But when you need to pay the soldiers, or you need to pay the logistics people who bring food to the army, then it’s much more accurate, because the king really wants to know if he has 7,000 soldiers, he has to pay, or a million soldiers. So this is what you learn for 10 years. That’s interesting.

• 2024-11-22 22:01 I remember reading something I don’t know 20 years ago about how when the Greeks were counting anything over a thousand or whatever is arbitrary, they decided there’s an infinite number of these, and they just stopped. Because it was like, we’re never Going to need a number larger than it might have been 10,000, because that was like the population of all of Greece at any given time. Or maybe it was 100,000.

• 2024-11-22 21:06 Because democracy relies on trust, dictatorship relies on terror. When you sow distrust, when you destroy trust in all institutions, the only way a society can keep functioning is by becoming a dictatorship.

• 2024-11-22 22:00 If you don’t believe any journalist, if you don’t believe any scientists, if you don’t believe the people in the election committee, then no democratic institution can function. And either you have anarchy, which most people don’t like. So they say, okay, let’s have a strong man that will just use terror to bring back order.

• 2024-11-22 22:00 The common view is that the only reality is power, that humans are only interested in power, and that all human relations are power struggles. So whenever somebody tells you something, you need not ask is it true or not. Nobody cares about the truth. Whenever somebody tells you something, this is a power play. This is a manipulation.

• 2024-11-22 22:00 This is an attempt by that person to manipulate you in order to get more power, to protect their privileges, their interests. And this is what you hear about journalists, that journalists are not interested in the truth. They are a conspiracy in order to advance the privileges of this elite or that elite. And scientists, they tell you it’s the same. Scientists don’t care about the truth.

• 2024-11-22 22:00 And what makes a person a populist? Is the argument that only we are the people. A populist party is a party that claims that all the people who doesn’t support it are not really part of the people.

• 2024-11-22 22:00 Nazi Germany. So the Nazis would say, anybody who doesn’t support Hitler is not really a German, he’s a Jew, he is a communist, he’s a traitor, he’s an alien.

• 2024-11-22 22:18 Who decides the algorithm? And the algorithm, like with this TaskRabbit example, they manipulate now millions and basically billions of people for their purposes.

• 2024-11-23 08:20 History begins when people start inventing stories, mythologies, religions, political ideologies, autistic traditions.

• 2024-11-23 08:21 And then every culture has its own sexual norms. And what you are encouraged to do, what you are not allowed to do, this is the dance.

• 2024-11-23 08:25 I mean, nobody plays Go like that. And then it turned out that it was actually a brilliant strategy.

• 2024-11-24 14:16 Like if you look now at the war in Gaza, there is a huge argument about it. We can get into this argument, but we know that AI is now being used to select the targets.

• 2024-11-24 14:16 I talked with a lot of people also from inside the army and the security system. They give you different versions. I’m not sure what is the truth. I’m not sure yet who to believe. They might not even know.

• 2024-11-23 11:11 The problems we have with AI is just a magnified version of the problem we had with bureaucracies throughout history.

• 2024-11-23 11:11 And then very, very recently in human evolution, just about 5,000 years ago, after the invention of writing and documents, bureaucracy appeared. Bureaucracies are systems of managing society with documents, with these complex systems of forms and manuals and tax registers and so forth.

• 2024-11-24 14:16 They are absolutely essential for large scale systems. There isn’t a single large scale system that can function without bureaucracy. It’s like the nerve system of this multicellular body. So whether it’s of course an army or a country, but also a church, a university, you need bureaucrats, it doesn’t function. And people find it very difficult to understand how bureaucracies function.

• 2024-11-24 14:16 they are very recent in evolution and we don’t have many stories about them. There are no. That’s right. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Hollywood blockbuster about bureaucracy? In fact, the only word I associate with bureaucracy is Byzantium.

• 2024-11-24 14:16 Byzantine. A Byzantine bureaucracy. Where did that come from, by the way? I know that’s a non sequitur, but where did that come from? Did they just have a complex bureaucracy or did they kind of invent? They had the most complex bureaucracy at the time. Very difficult to understand, but kept the empire going, you know, collecting taxes, paying soldiers and so forth

• 2024-11-23 13:39 Not the person from Game of Thrones, but the real Jon Snow, which saved humanity, almost like the Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, by bureaucracy. He was trained as a doctor and he suspected the problem was actually in the water.

• 2024-11-23 13:41 And this is how it links to AI. AI. They will become the new bureaucrats. I mean, when people talk about the danger of AI, they often have the Hollywood scenario of the great robot rebellion.

• 2024-11-24 14:15 I’m not an expert on what specifically happens in China, especially because you don’t have one social credit system there. You have dozens of different systems experiments. They are testing different approaches to it. I know it’s a pretty limited rollout where each area, like you said, has. It might even be like a province thing.

• 2024-11-23 13:43 The idea of the social credit is to monetize everything, to give value to every single thing you do in life.

• 2024-11-23 13:47 And she clicked on it and it said something like, this person does not pay back money that he owes to companies or people.

• 2024-11-23 13:53 Maybe it has good advice, but I need to know that this is an AI and not a human being. Yeah, yeah. And ideally that a Human being.

• 2024-11-23 13:54 I mean, I would have like today, the smartest people in the world working on the problem of how do you establish trust between humans before working on how do we create super AIs?