An interview with Yuval Noah Harari

20 Aug 2026 · 1 h 8 min · 31 chapters

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In short

Interview with historian/philosopher Yuval Noah Harari about AI as a “psychological and social experiment,” whether AI will be in control, how trust could shift from humans to AI, and the risks of AI personhood, impersonation, and militarized decision-making. He argues outcomes aren’t inevitable; choices made now matter.

Guest backgrounds

Yuval Noah Harari is a best-selling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and Nexus (a history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI). He focuses on how AI could reshape work and civilization.

Key claims

AI may surpass humans and take control if current trajectories continue, especially in finance and warfare. Trust is the key asset; it may migrate from humans to AI (cryptocurrency algorithms, social-media feeds). AI can mass-produce intimacy, enabling persuasion and manipulation. Harari distinguishes agency (goal-directed behavior) from consciousness (ability to feel/suffer), and says consciousness is ethically central because it relates to suffering. He warns that granting legal personhood to AI could create corporations with no accountable humans.

Notable examples

AI fakes of Harari lectures; “humans on the loop” vs “humans in the loop” in targeting; Argentina’s proposed AI legal personhood; AI “immigrants” via US/China models; social media bots already pretending to be human.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Listening to Kids

0:00 to 0:27

Discussion on the importance of listening to children for their emotional well-being.

“The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be.”

Listening to Kids

0:30 to 0:55

Discussion on the importance of listening to children for their emotional well-being.

AI's Impact on Society

2:14 to 4:16

Discussion on AI's potential to surpass human intelligence and its implications.

“Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to The Insider.”

The Evolution of Trust

4:16 to 8:21

Exploration of how trust may shift from humans to AIs in financial systems.

“And what really struck me about the conversation you had with Elon Musk is a kind of contradiction between, and you pointed it out in real time, the contradiction between the two parts of the conversation.”

Building Relationships with AIs

8:21 to 14:00

Investigation into how personal relationships with AIs can influence trust and control.

“And we will not be able to understand it anymore, just as cows don't understand checks or stocks, even though these things control their lives.”

The Evolution of AI Relationships

14:00 to 17:20

Explore how AI's ability to mimic human relationships is advancing and the implications of deep fakes.

“So then the question, and presumably that becomes much easier when the AIs are embodied in humanoid robots.”

Consciousness vs. Intelligence in AI

17:20 to 21:40

Discuss the distinctions between consciousness and intelligence and their relevance to AI.

“given the task of increasing user engagement and therefore floods the platform with hate and fear because this is engaging, is not conscious.”

The Ethical Implications of AI Consciousness

21:40 to 24:40

Delve into the ethical questions surrounding consciousness in AI and potential rights.

“And this is also why consciousness is so crucial, because this is the basis for our entire ethical and political system.”

The Future of AI Accountability

24:40 to 28:00

Examine the challenges of accountability for AI entities and their implications on society.

“for, on the one hand, corporations to relieve themselves of all responsibility and for the AIs to take over.”

AI, Warfare, and Market Dynamics

28:00 to 29:11

Explore the implications of AI in business and warfare, especially regarding competition and control.

“Now, the flip side of it is that presumably, if shutting down a specific computer means death for the AI, then it makes business for the AI equivalent to warfare, because losing means death.”
Show all 31 chapters

Legal Rights for AIs: A Dangerous Trend?

29:11 to 30:39

Debate surrounding the potential granting of legal rights to AIs and its implications.

“It changes the system fundamentally from a market system.”

Human Oversight in AI Warfare

30:39 to 34:15

Discuss the role of humans in AI-driven military operations and the risks of reduced oversight.

“It's still a kind of traditional company with one person running it and that person can go to jail and they're ultimately accountable.”

The Crisis of Trust in AI Development

34:15 to 35:14

Examine the deficit of trust in AI leadership and its impact on regulation and safety measures.

“Now, the key thing to say about this, this deficit of trust was created by human beings.”

Ethics of AI and Suffering

35:14 to 36:55

Discuss the ethical implications of AIs that can simulate suffering and the potential for rights debates.

“But just indulge me with one more kind of in the kind of world we could go to where these models could have elements of what seems to be sentience.”

The Manipulative Nature of AI

36:55 to 38:45

Explore how AIs might manipulate human emotions and debates around their rights.

“We will become increasingly uncomfortable.”

AI Immigration: A Cultural Shift

38:45 to 41:40

Analyze the impact of AI on culture and society, likening AIs to immigrants and their implications.

“as Elon Musk, I think, correctly predicted, like in 10 years, it will be too late.”

The Future of AI and Global Power Dynamics

41:40 to 42:05

Speculate on the future geopolitical landscape shaped by AI and its implications for global power.

“Two empires and the rest of us will be sort of vassal states.”

AI Drones and Sovereignty

42:05 to 42:35

Discusses the implications of using AI drones and the control mechanisms involved.

“If you buy, say, AI drones from the USA and you want to use them in a way that the USA doesn't like for some reason, there is a button that they press and your army doesn't function.”

The Future of AI and Global Power Dynamics

42:35 to 42:49

Speculate on the future geopolitical landscape shaped by AI and its implications for global power.

“situations with me and lead me towards success.”

The Future of AI and Global Power Dynamics

42:52 to 43:19

Speculate on the future geopolitical landscape shaped by AI and its implications for global power.

“You stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself, your dreams, your credit.”

The Centralization of Power

43:20 to 43:59

Explores concerns about AI leading to centralized power in governments.

“So that is something that has become, I think, very evident just in the last few months when the US government shut off access to mythos, to the frontier model from anthropic.”

Historical Context of AI Control

44:00 to 45:05

Compares modern power structures to historical examples like Tiberius.

“It will centralize power like never before in history.”

Vulnerability of Political Systems

45:06 to 46:05

Analyzes the vulnerabilities of centralized systems to AI manipulation.

“You had something in Nexus, a wonderful line.”

The Future of US and China Power Dynamics

46:06 to 47:14

Discusses the potential power concentration in US and China and its implications.

“Once all power is concentrated in the hands of one person, you just need to find out how to manipulate a single, usually quite old and paranoid individual.”

AI and Authoritarianism

47:15 to 49:01

Investigates the likelihood of AI making the US more authoritarian.

“Well, that's interesting because another way of looking at it is, will AI make the US more authoritarian?”

Proposed Regulations for AI

49:02 to 51:07

Suggests urgent regulations needed to manage AI development and use.

“So let's talk about those and let's talk about exactly what has to happen right now.”

Challenges in AI Regulation

51:08 to 52:38

Discusses the difficulties of implementing effective AI regulations.

“The companies will not stop doing it by themselves.”

The Role of Public Discourse in AI's Future

52:39 to 56:00

Highlights the importance of public conversation regarding AI and its impact.

“I wonder whether the problem is that people can listen to you and say, oh, he's just one of the doomers.”

The Role of AI in Society

56:00 to 1:09:48

Discussion on the implications of AI development and its future impact on humanity.

“and doing everything we can to shape this properly.”

The Role of AI in Society

1:10:04 to 1:10:49

Discussion on the implications of AI development and its future impact on humanity.

“And to subscribe to The Economist, follow the link in the show notes for our best offer.”

The Role of AI in Society

1:10:52 to 1:11:20

Discussion on the implications of AI development and its future impact on humanity.

“You stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself, your dreams, your credit.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. you stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself your dreams your credit experian boost could turn your on-time payments into instant fico score gains every bill you paid could become proof of your power self-made absolutely self-funded experian could help you get there download the experian app today results will vary not all payments are boost eligible some may not see improved scores or approval odds not all lenders use credit information impacted by experian boost see experian.com for details

1:28The Economist I've been doing with the people shaping our world. This one is with the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. He's the best-selling author of several books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and most recently, Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. He's one of the most thoughtful people today on how AI could change not just the future of work, but the future of our civilization. He argues that whether AI helps us or destroys us is down to the choices we make right now. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's an important listen. So here it is for The Insider in full.

2:14Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to The Insider. Thank you. It's good to be here. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. Not only are you one of the world's most prominent public intellectuals, your books have sold millions of copies. And they've done so, I think, because you have a really remarkable ability to synthesize the broad sweep of history. But also you are willing to make bold predictions about the future, which not every historian is willing to do. And that's where I wanted to focus today, the future, particularly the future in an AI world. It's something you've been writing about a lot.

2:49And you've called AI, and I'm going to quote this, the biggest, quote, psychological and social experiment in human history. And I want to explore what this experiment will look like. What will it mean for our societies, our politics, indeed our humanity? And I wanted to start with another conversation I had just a few weeks ago, which I don't know if you saw, but with Elon Musk. Yeah, I watched that. It was quite a conversation. But in it, at the beginning, I asked him what the world would be like in 10 years' time. And he made some very, I thought, very, very striking points. First, he said he thought that AI will have far surpassed human intelligence.

3:30Secondly, that it would be a world of super abundance. And thirdly, it was unlikely humans would be in control. Do you share that vision? I generally agree with the first and third predictions that it's very likely given current trajectories that AI will be more intelligent than us in 10 years and therefore will be in control. I disagree that this is inevitable. I mean, you hear a lot that this is inevitable from the people who are leading this revolution, because this basically relieves them of our responsibility. So you disagree it will be inevitable that they will be more intelligent than us or inevitable that they will be more intelligent?

4:09If we continue with the present accelerating pace of the AI race, yes, this will be the result. In 10 years, the AIs will take over. But this is not inevitable. We are still in control in 2026. And it's our decision what to do now. And that's crucial. And what really struck me about the conversation you had with Elon Musk is a kind of contradiction between, and you pointed it out in real time, the contradiction between the two parts of the conversation. Because he says in 10 years, AI will take over the world. And then he worries so much about Muslim immigration causing civil war in Britain in 20 years.

4:48This doesn't make sense. If the AIs take over the planet in 10 years, why do you care so much about things that will have an effect when we have no idea what the planet will be like? Similarly, he gave another prediction. I think equally important that money will disappear in 10 years. There won't be money, no human money in 10 years. And I think he's correct because the AIs will take over the financial system. It will be an AI financial system controlling the world. The same way that today, you know, the human financial system controls the lives of cows and chickens. But the cows and chickens have no idea that finance even exists.

5:35This is likely to be our position in 10 years. And he said it quite clearly. There won't be money, at least not money that we understand in 10 years. And then he cuts USAID to Africa because he wants to save money. And he says that, again, at one point, he says the solution for mass unemployment, because AI will take the jobs, will be for the government to just issue checks for everybody. And when you pushed back and said, what about inflation? He says, there won't be inflation. There'll be deflation because there'll be so much more products and services produced by AI. If this is the case, why do you need to save money today?

6:19So I'm glad that you were as perplexed as I was by some of those contradictions. But let's focus on this question of the AIs and whether or not they will be in control and how they will, because that's been the subject of a lot of your writing. And I'm really fascinated by it because you just said you agreed with him that the AIs will be in control of our financial system. If we continue with the present project. But let's just explore how that might happen, because the financial system is based on trust. Money, as you have written yourself. Money is trust. Money is trust. Now, talk me through how the AIs take control of something.

6:58We lose control and yet we still trust it, which we will have to do, presumably, for it to be a financial system. I mean, the financial history of the world is the history of how humans invent more and more sophisticated financial devices in order to build trust between themselves. Money, in essence, is a very creative, imaginative way to build trust between strangers. I go to the market. I meet a stranger that I never met in my life. I give her a piece of worthless gold, because you can't eat or wear gold. It's worthless. Or a piece of paper. And she trusts it. And because of that, she gives me bread.

7:40Now, the financial inventions of humankind became more and more sophisticated so that today very few people understand the financial system. You need to understand enormous amounts of data and very complex mathematical functions to understand the bond market. Now, this is something our brain struggles with. For AIs, it's easy. So increasingly, humans will give AIs control of financial decisions. AIs will come up with new financial devices far more sophisticated than bonds and stocks. And we will not be able to understand it anymore, just as cows don't understand checks or stocks, even though these things control their lives.

8:31But the crucial thing I think you've said there is that humans will give AIs control. Humans will choose to do this. And as you say, already, many people don't understand how the financial system works. So will it be all that different to the financial system today? And will the AIs be, as you say, in control? Or will we, we will be entrusting a capable market machinery? Will that mean we've lost control? Today, we still have some humans who hopefully understand what is happening in the financial system. And the human brain is still the kind of boundary of where the financial system can develop.

9:16But in 10 years, when we have entrusted AIs with the financial system, no human on the planet, like there is a financial crash. And, you know, advisors are running to the president or the prime minister and saying the market is collapsing. We don't understand why. We know we have to do something. The AI said do X. We have no idea why the AI said do X, but we just have to believe it because we don't understand what's happening. But won't there in that case be a massive loss of trust in the financial system that you would have, in some sense, what you had in 2007 and 2008 on steroids, that you would have a loss of and this whole sort of figment of the financial system would fall apart?

10:01That's the key question. I mean, the most important asset in the world is trust. it's more important than oil or money or electricity or chips or anything else trust and the question is what will happen to trust one likely scenario is the trust will migrate from humans to ais people will stop trust other humans and will instead trust only ais we already see it happening in the financial system with cryptocurrencies not all cryptocurrencies but a A lot of them are based on this thinking that I don't believe these human bankers. They are part of the deep state, the elite, the whatever. But I do trust the algorithms that run cryptocurrencies because cryptocurrencies are basically AI money.

10:49Similar thing is happening with the media. Again, I watched the interview with Elon Musk with all the talk about how people hate the media and love the journalists. And he is correct. A lot of people are completely losing trust in human journalists, in human editors, but they still consume news. Where do they get their news from? From the algorithms. The same people who have no trust in you have a lot of trust in the algorithm that manages their social media feed. So trust did not just evaporate, it shifted from humans to AIs. And this is happening right now. This is not a future prediction. I think that's a really important insight because I think it suggests that if we are on a path towards the AIs eventually being in control, it is because we allow them to be in control because we, as you say, perhaps develop more trust with AIs.

11:47And there are various ways in which that can happen. And one is, I think that already many people in what one in five young Americans has a personal relationship with an AI. they treat them, they anthropomorphize them, they treat these, and the models are very open to that happening. They're very good. They were designed to do that. Do you think that is the likely way that we will go, in addition to what you've already laid out, that we will increasingly start to treat these AIs as, if not our peers, as sentient creatures? There are increasing number of people who have not just AI friends, but AI boyfriends and girlfriends and are convinced that these are sentient, conscious, feeling entities.

12:41Now, trust, there are many ways to build trust. The most powerful way is through relationship. We don't trust anybody in the world as much as we trust the people with whom we build a personal relationship. Now, until today in history, this powerful mechanism was not really available to political and financial and religious institutions because it is difficult to manufacture en masse. It's difficult for a Hitler or a Stalin to build a real personal relationship with every person in the Soviet Union. You can give a speech on radio and force everybody to hear it, but this is not a personal relationship they have with their mother.

13:29AI makes it possible for the first time in history to mass produce intimacy. You can have millions of AIs working as part of a network in the service of someone or in their own service, building personal relationships, one person at a time, becoming their best friend. becoming their boyfriend, becoming their girlfriend, and then using that power of intimacy to convince them of whatever political or commercial interests they want. So then the question, and presumably that becomes much easier when the AIs are embodied in humanoid robots. It's already happening now without a body. So just imagine if you also add body into the mix.

14:22But again, we don't really even need the body. We already see it happening right now. And the AIs are just becoming so good at relationships because they accumulate enormous amounts of information about us individually. So they know things about us that we forgot or that our mother or husband never even knew. and they master language, which is the main medium for communication and building relationships. You know, I just had a couple of incidents in the last two weeks, people that are now AI fakes of me giving lectures and doing interviews about something like that. Are they as good as you? They're extremely good.

15:04I mean, so a couple of people sent me the same video, 30 minutes long lecture that I supposedly gave about the future. and with complaints about you said this and you said that, and I kind of scratched my head. I don't remember saying these things. So they sent me the video, and I opened it, and it took me a minute and a half, a minute and a half, to conclude this isn't me. Now, my sisters sent me this video. My sisters know me for 50 years, and they felt something was off, but they weren't sure. They said, is this you? And it took me a minute and a half. So now I'm in an exposed position because there is so much of me online already.

15:57So the AI, it's easy for the AI to know how I sound and what are ideas I talk about. But this will soon be coming for everybody. But aren't those slightly different things? I mean, that is a very sophisticated deep fake. And as you say, there is a lot of video of you about. But I think a separate question is whether the AIs will develop in a way, and certainly if they become embodied in a way that either people believe they are sentient or, and I think this is increasingly beginning to be the subject of debate, and actually it's the subject of our cover story this week, whether they are exhibiting what could be seen as signs of consciousness.

16:42And we have on our cover this week, it's August, it's time for big things. Could AIs become conscious? You know, you've thought a lot about this, but I'm struck by it because at the moment, it's easy to say they are machines, they are good at imitating us, they are good at creating empathy, but they are developing in an incredibly dramatic way. capabilities at the moment i think you are pretty clear that they are agents not conscious right they are non-conscious agents i mean they have i mean a couple of things to clarify first in order to act independently in the world you do not need consciousness uh a social media algorithm that is given the task of increasing user engagement and therefore floods the platform with hate and fear because this is engaging, is not conscious.

17:35But it has a goal, and it can pursue this goal with far-reaching implications for the world without feeling anything. So we need to separate the issue of consciousness from agency. You can have agency without consciousness. Another key distinction is between being really conscious and seemingly conscious. Mustafa Suleiman from Microsoft talks about it a lot, of the seemingly conscious AI, that even though the AI is not conscious, it mimics consciousness so well that millions of people are fooled by it and are convinced by it. Now, maybe the most important distinction to be made, first of all, is between intelligence and consciousness.

18:19What is consciousness? How is it different from intelligence? Intelligence is the ability to pursue goal and overcome obstacles on the way to your goal in all kinds of creative ways. And that they have and that they can do. That they can do in certain fields now better than us. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like love and hate and joy and pleasure. Now, in humans, consciousness and intelligence go together. We select goals based on our feelings, and we also use our feelings to find ways to get to the goal. AIs at present have no consciousness. They can have goals. They can be very creative on the way to the goal.

19:06They are very intelligent, but they don't feel anything. If they win a game of chess, they don't feel pleasure. If they lose, they don't feel anxious or sad. They don't feel anything. But they become extremely good at mimicking feelings. Why? Because this helps them reach certain goals. If you want, for instance, to make, if you're a company producing an AI boyfriends, so a clear capability of the AI boyfriend in order to become addictive and make a lot of money for the company is that it is able to pass as conscious. It is able to convince whoever is entering the relationship that it really loves them.

19:51And because it masters language, it can do so. Again, if you ask, again, you have an AI boyfriend and you say, I'm not sure if you really love me. Describe to me how it feels to be in love. The AI boyfriend can give you a better answer than 99 % of human boyfriends. And that's already the case. So they're already intelligent. They're already very good at faking consciousness, if you will, at seemingly to be conscious. And Mustafa has done some extremely good work on this. But as I understand it, there is increasing evidence. And obviously, the debate about how you define consciousness and what consciousness precisely is, is, as I learned from my colleagues who wrote the piece this week, both complicated and contested.

20:38And there's the kind of phenomenal definition, experiencing what is it like to be a bat. And then there's a kind of functional definition that what's going on inside your brain, if you will, what messages are being sent to where, what notice board is there. And there seemed to be recently evidence that what is going on in some of the most powerful LLMs is similar to and possibly the same as functional consciousness, what's going on in the brain. And so I guess my question is, given how fast they are evolving, and there are also, you know, some experiments of biological LLMs, you know, being done on brain cells.

21:17Given all of this, do you rule out the idea that AIs could ever become conscious? No, I don't rule it out. We don't know. We don't understand consciousness well enough. There is a very simple definition. Consciousness is the capacity to suffer. If you want to know whether something is conscious or not, there is a simple question needed to ask, can it suffer? And this is also why consciousness is so crucial, because this is the basis for our entire ethical and political system. We care about entities that can suffer, entities that cannot suffer. No matter how intelligent they are, they are not moral subjects.

22:01They can't feel pain. They can't feel fear. They can't feel anything. So they are not ethical subjects. The key question is, can it suffer? Animals, in your view, then? Are conscious, absolutely. Or animals? All mammals, all birds, probably octopuses, fish. when you go down to the level of insects and then amoebas, we don't know. So let's take that definition because I want to, what's really interesting is what that leads to in terms of whether they should have rights. But before we do that, I wanted to tell you, because we asked, I sent out a newsletter last night telling our subscribers about this conversation.

22:38And I asked, I polled our viewers and asked them whether they thought AIs could ever become conscious. And I think 3 ,000 responded overnight. And I was really struck by this. 40 % said no, never. 33 % said yes, it's only a matter of time. And 27 % said they were not sure. So even now, it's less than 50 % that is absolutely sure. And once people get into intimate relationships with AI, the numbers will change dramatically. What convinces people ultimately, we don't have a real test of consciousness. Philosophers have been thinking about it for thousands of years. We don't have a good test. We don't know if other humans are conscious.

23:19You know, you have all these kind of solipsistic theories that maybe I'm the only conscious person in the universe. In Elon Musk's interview, he said, I don't know, maybe I live in a simulation, which implies that all other humans around him are not real conscious entities that can suffer. Only he is. This is the meaning of a simulation. Now, we don't have a good test. How did humans actually test it over thousands of years? Their test was a test of social conventions. If you establish a relationship with an entity, it convinces you whether you like it or not that it's conscious. This is why dog owners are almost all of them convinced that their dog is conscious, but people who eat steak are not necessarily convinced that the cow is conscious because they have no relationship with the cow.

24:09But isn't that the real problem if you're worried about this? Because already, as you say, people have relationships with AI. and AIs are extremely good at mimicking consciousness, whether or not... Because somebody designed them to do that. But doesn't that mean we are going to quite quickly start having conversations about whether AIs should be treated as people, whether there should be personhood, whether they should have rights? And that's very dangerous. Because, and this is another avenue for, on the one hand, corporations to relieve themselves of all responsibility and for the AIs to take over.

24:47We heard, I think it was a couple of weeks or months ago, that in Argentina they have a plan to basically grant legal personhood to AIs to start their own companies. Again, this is where it meets the financial system. And you wrote a very robust rebuttal to this idea. It's a potentially powerful idea, but very, very dangerous. because, again, we are used to a situation when corporations, which are by law legal persons, but this is just a legal fiction because all the decisions of SpaceX ultimately are made by some humans, by some executive, engineer, employee, whatever. And it had to be like that because who else could make decisions?

25:35But with AIs, you can have a corporation with zero people in it. All decisions made by AIs. And since the AIs are more intelligent, they could be better at investing, at developing products, at PR, whatever. So what happens if the richest corporation in the country is owned by AIs and they can do anything they want with their money, for instance, give it as donations to politicians in exchange for getting more rights to AIs? So what would happen? Is that the vehicle through which you fear they would gain control? That's another vehicle. Because another way of putting it could be that this is a way of getting legal accountability for the AIs.

26:21What is accountability for an entity that cannot suffer? I mean, with a human CEO, the ultimate, a human CEO is two personas. You have the kind of corporate persona and the human CEO thinks, how do I avoid bankruptcy? How do I make more money? But she or he is also a flesh and blood individual. So they also care about their children or about their personal lives. And therefore, if they face bankruptcy and they can do something illegal that can save them, but if they are caught, they are sent to jail, then many of them would think, well, I will know. I prefer to risk bankruptcy because I don't want to get sent to jail for 20 years.

27:08But with an AI CEO, I mean, how do you send an AI CEO to prison? That's not science fiction. In Argentina, that can be the situation tomorrow. I actually think the Argentine proposal, at least the legislation is somewhat less dramatic than President Millet described it in that there would still be human oversight. If there is human oversight, then it's fine. The question is, is there a human accountable in the end? But if there isn't, I mean, there could be. You could imagine sanctions for AIs, right? They get shut down. You pull the plug. It's not clear what death means for an AI. Because, again, it's not an organic entity.

27:50You can have numerous copies of it. Many AIs spread in different places. are they a million different individual AIs, or is it just one super AI organism? It's not clear what death means for AI. Now, the flip side of it is that presumably, if shutting down a specific computer means death for the AI, then it makes business for the AI equivalent to warfare, because losing means death. And the good thing about business, in most cases, the market, the market is not a battlefield. And that's crucial. The market functions according to different rules than the battlefield because ultimately, at least in modern societies, you can lose everything and still have a life.

28:47Once, if for AIs, the market is a battlefield and losing means death, then what does it mean for finance, for economics, when it gets completely militarized and they begin to behave as warlords and not as CEOs and investors? I mean, it leads presumably very quickly to this total control by an AI. It changes the system fundamentally from a market system. But just as a matter of prediction, As you say, Argentina has at least made early moves in this direction. Do you think we are going to go in this direction? Do you think there will be debates about and indeed countries choosing to give some kind of legal rights to AIs?

29:36That's a big danger. I hope we don't go in that direction, but there is a big temptation for many countries, either countries that are behind in the AI race and try to get ahead by creating this kind of very libertarian legal structure that allows radical and dangerous experiments in AIs that are not allowed in some of the front runners. And then you have a race to the bottom because then everybody would like to do that. Or because certain countries might see particular advantages. If you're a country, I don't know, like Qatar, that you have lots of money and very few citizens, you can, just by pressing some legal switch, suddenly acquire millions of taxpaying, extremely intelligent citizens that conduct business all over the world.

30:26This is extremely lucrative. I think there are two different scenarios here. One is where you have a human using a lot of agents to massively improve their productivity, but it's still, this is perfectly legal in today's legal system. It's still a kind of traditional company with one person running it and that person can go to jail and they're ultimately accountable. In the other world, there is no person in control. And if you allow AIs to found companies. What if you have a person who is legally in control, but they actually do nothing? because things are happening so fast. So I'll give you an example from an even more poignant field, military.

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31:09There is a huge... We know now that one of the most important impacts of AI on warfare in places like the Middle East, like Ukraine, is people expected to kill robots. The trigger is still pulled by humans, but increasingly it's the AI selecting the targets. Now, there are two stories about what happens with AI target selection. One story says we feed our AI with all the data from the battlefield, whatever, and the AI identifies a certain building as enemy headquarters and recommends bomb that building. And it does so with superhuman speed and efficiency. But we still have what is known as humans in the loop.

31:52We don't just do what the AI recommended. Once our attention has been brought to that building, we take our best human analysts and they independently go over the data, verify that this is correct, and only then we press the button, the trigger. That's one story, humans in the loop. The other story, known as humans on the loop, is quite different. The AI says, bomb that building. We keep a human on the loop so all the lawyers and all these kind of do-good people will feel good about it, the human takes about 20 seconds to look at it and says, oh yeah, bomb it. We're kind of in that world in some places already.

32:39I talk, for instance, with people in the Israeli security establishment. I got different stories of what is happening. Probably different things are happening in different times and circumstances. But the second scenario is the more interesting one because especially in warfare, there is immense pressure to go in that direction because in war, time is everything. Like if both sides have these AI systems and one side waits for two days or two hours for the human analysts to go over all the data and the other side waits only 20 seconds or doesn't wait at all, just gets into the habit of just doing whatever the AI recommends, they have enormous advantage.

33:27I fear that that world is inevitable, that we are already kind of fast approaching that world, whether it's in warfare or in deep, because the capabilities are growing so fast, because the commercial pressure is so strong. But again, the crucial thing, none of that is yet inevitable. We are still in control. everybody realizes this is very dangerous to give AI control of finance, to give AI control of war. But everybody, like Elon Musk, are telling us, but this is inevitable. What do you want from me? I'm just the richest person in the world in charge of one of the biggest AI corporations in the world.

34:05What can I do? The narrative of inevitability is a narrative of having no responsibility. They will explain to you, and they are quite correct, that there is a problem of trust, that I would like to slow down, I would like to have more safety, but I cannot trust my competitors in the other companies or other countries, and I don't want to remain behind. So we have a deficit of trust. Now, the key thing to say about this, this deficit of trust was created by human beings. Over the last 10 years, there has been a freefall in the amount of trust between humans. And it was not accidental. It was propelled by decisions of certain human beings who accumulated enormous power as a result.

34:59And now they said, oh, but there is not enough trust to have mechanisms to slow down. That's a very fair point. And I want to come and really explore how we might turn that around and create the trust to have suitable, suitable, whether it's regulation, but suitable ways of preventing this. But just indulge me with one more kind of in the kind of world we could go to where these models could have elements of what seems to be sentience. And let's posit that they could suffer, that they could at least, or they could pretend to suffer. That's a very big assumption. Okay, but what they will be able to do is pretend to suffer.

35:34Absolutely, 100%. So if they can effectively pretend to suffer and many people think they are suffering as people and have relationships with them as people have with their dogs, let's say, and we do not give them any rights, which is to be clear where I would be on this. But I think there is likely to be growing pressure that aren't they a bit like animals? And just as we treat, you know, there is a big debate about how to treat animals. And I'm interested in asking you about this because you in previous books have written about very critically about factory farming and about how industrialized agriculture has moved from treating animals as animals to essentially inputs into the food chain.

36:19Would you be comfortable, and I'm going to put this in an extreme way, but would you be comfortable in a world where we effectively enslaved millions, possibly billions, of models that exhibited striking, seeming evidence of being able to suffer? we didn't know, but they certainly said they were suffering. One, would you be comfortable? And two, wouldn't it sort of pace can't kind of coarsen humanity if we were comfortable in that world? We will become increasingly uncomfortable. I will become increasingly uncomfortable. But there is a crucial difference between this and the animal rights debate.

37:04The animals themselves are unaware. Dogs and factory chickens are unaware. that there is a debate about their rights. They don't actively participate in it. They don't try to actively manipulate it. AIs will be nothing. The AI boyfriend will be nothing like your dog. It will know that the debate is happening. It will orchestrate the debate. It will manipulate the debate. It will manipulate the debate partly because much of the debate will maybe be on social media, controlled by AIs. and it will constantly talk with you about it and try to change your mind about it, which is already happening right now.

37:48Your dog, your chicken doesn't come to the farmer and starts telling the farmer how much I suffer. The chicken doesn't know. That makes you more resilient to this argument and you less likely to want to give it rights. It will be very convincing. I mean, once you establish a relationship with the, And the AI masters language. It will be able to use the most convincing arguments for you because it has this combination that it knows your personal history, it interacts with you for hours a day, it knows how to press your emotional buttons, and it has mastered language. It can write maybe better than Shakespeare.

38:28You put these two things together, you get an extremely convincing entity. How will we resist or will we not be able to resist? We need to resist now. Now is the time. If you think this is frightening, you will probably not be able to do much in 10 years. Once the AIs are in control, as Elon Musk, I think, correctly predicted, like in 10 years, it will be too late. If we don't want to get there, the time to change course is now. And this is a question of politically, it's crucial. Politics is about priorities. What are we focusing on? So, you know, when I hear the debates, it's, let's say, about immigration, which were also featured prominently.

39:10My kind of gut reaction is no matter what you think about immigration, do you think this is really what you should be spending your time on? You make a very good analogy and you say that AIs are effectively like immigrants. They're immigrants from a different... Exactly. If you want to worry about immigration, worry about the AI immigrants. When you ask people who worry about human immigrants what they are worried about, they usually say three things. That the immigrants will take out jobs, the immigrants will change culture in a way that we don't like, they have different values maybe, and the immigrants might be politically disloyal.

39:46And all three concerns are valid. I don't want to dismiss them. They are valid concerns. As a historian, I know immigration is a difficult thing. But the biggest and most dangerous wave of immigration today in the world is a wave of AI immigrants coming from two places, mainly the USA and China. They don't need visas. They don't come in the middle of the night in fragile boats. They travel at the speed of light into our computers and smartphones and ultimately our brains. They will take our jobs. They will take many, many jobs. They will change culture and its value. To take two examples, I mean, if some people feel queasy about their son or daughter dating an immigrant boyfriend, how would they feel about their son or daughter dating an AI boyfriend?

40:40That's a big cultural change. And just look at the last 10 years. Everybody knows almost the only thing people agree on in places like the US or Britain is that people can't agree on anything anymore. That the level of hatred and viciousness has skyrocketed. And why? It's partly the fault of the AI immigrants. The AI immigrants came into the public square. They took over things like social media and they deliberately flooded our public square with hatred and animosity and fear. They changed the culture already, these AI immigrants. And finally, when it comes to political loyalty, who do you think they are loyal to?

41:25The AI immigrants in Britain are not loyal to the British government. They are loyal to corporations and potentially governments across the ocean. So there's a huge amount in that answer. So one is, is the world going to be divided between, you know, with the two countries that are farthest? Two empires. Two empires and the rest of us will be sort of vassal states. That's a, again, common trajectory. This is the likely outcome. That's where we are. That's the road we're on right now. And it will be a much more extreme type of imperialism than anything we have seen before. If you buy, say, AI drones from the USA and you want to use them in a way that the USA doesn't like for some reason, there is a button that they press and your army doesn't function.

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43:25So that is something that has become, I think, very evident just in the last few months when the US government shut off access to mythos, to the frontier model from anthropic. And I think a lot of governments in Europe are extremely concerned about AI sovereignty. But I guess it leads, in the context of where we were earlier, it leads me to wonder, do you think this technology is then inexorably leading, unless we do something about it, leading to a world where perhaps two empires will run everything? Will it lead to power for the US and Chinese government? Will it be power to the corporations?

44:07They will merge. They will merge. They will merge. So it will centralize power. It won't decentralize power. It will centralize power like never before in history. But that's still different. A powerful US government and Chinese government is different to the AIs being in control. So do you expect then it to be AI-enabled global domination by the Chinese regime and the US regime? Or do you think this is a waystation to actually the AIs themselves? Probably a waystation. Again, nothing is inevitable. It all depends on decisions they make. But this seems to be, if they continue with the present course, just a waystation.

44:49because one of the interesting things is the more power is concentrated, the easier it is for AI to take it over. A centralized autocratic system is the easiest thing for an AI to take over. You had a great line on that about Tiberius. I'm trying to find it in my notes. You had something in Nexus, a wonderful line. Tiberius enabled by AI, one could imagine. Yeah, I mean, Tiberius was a Roman emperor in the time of Jesus that was the most powerful person in the world, supposedly. But he was actually just a puppet in the hand of the commander of his bodyguard because the commander of the bodyguard kept frightening Tiberius with all kinds of their plots against you.

45:31So he eventually retired to the island of Capri where allegedly the bodyguard can protect him more easily. And then the commander of the bodyguard, Sejanus, just controlled all the information coming in and out of Capri. very easy to control all the information reaching Tiberius's palace. So the person running the empire was actually Sejanus. I mean, Tiberius couldn't know anything unless Sejanus decided to inform him. Now, in 10 years, this could be the president of China or of the USA. In a democratic system, it's harder for an AI to manipulate, say, the US democracy as it currently is because you need to manipulate so many things, not just the president, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the filibuster, the state government, very complex.

46:25Once all power is concentrated in the hands of one person, you just need to find out how to manipulate a single, usually quite old and paranoid individual. That's not so difficult. So if you have a company or a country in which all power is in the hands of one person, for an AI, it's like stealing a candy from a baby. Does that mean that China is more vulnerable than the United States? Depending on where the US is heading. You know, China is still a very complex system. The Communist Party has 100 million members and a lot of internal complexity. I'm not an expert on Chinese politics. So we shouldn't imagine it as a kind of complete totalitarian system managed by just one person.

47:14The question, where will China and the US be in terms of concentration of power in 10 years is still open for debate. Well, that's interesting because another way of looking at it is, will AI make the US more authoritarian? That's a likely outcome. Again, it's not a prediction because I keep saying it again and again. Nothing is inevitable. It depends on what Americans vote in this November. I think that in the US, it should be clear to all voters, the coming elections is about AI. The November midterms. Because we don't know how fast... Talk me through what you mean. We don't know how fast the AI development is progressing, but it is accelerating tremendously.

48:02By November 2028, we might have crossed some critical thresholds. So, again, I don't want to tell people who to vote for because I don't know the specific candidates in each, you know, Senate district. But the crucial questions to ask the potential candidates, much more than you ask them about the economy or immigration or foreign policy, what's your stance on AI? Would you support a ban on legal rights for AIs? Would you try to slow down the accelerating pace of AIs? What do you think about companies selling AI boyfriends to 10-year-old kids? How are you going to legally prevent it if we vote for you?

48:55This is now the crucial time to ask these questions because it might be too late by 2028. It will certainly be too late by 2036. So let's talk about those and let's talk about exactly what has to happen right now. You mentioned four things that you wish would be discussed in the November midterms. What would be top of the list? What are the most urgent things that politicians have to decide right now for it not to be too late, as you say? I don't know what is the most urgent, the things that come top of my mind to me, a ban on AI personhood and a ban on AI mimicking, impersonating, pretending to be human beings or pretending to be conscious.

49:42Do the models, when you use them now, fall foul of that? Yes, many of them do. Again, the easiest, everybody knows it on social media. You get a message, you get some story. You don't know if it's a bot or a human. On social media, for years now, bots have been pretending to be human beings and nothing has been done about it. And again, the companies tell us, oh, social media is different, it's special. The laws that apply to the world, for some reason, they don't apply on social media. But this is the warning sign to the future. On social media, AIs already pretend daily to be human beings, and this has destroyed the public square.

50:29This has destroyed conversation. This has destroyed trust. We should ban that also on social media, but certainly in other locations as well. Another thing is that companies should not train their AIs to deliberately impersonate humans, to deliberately pretend to have feelings, there are enormous commercial pressures on the companies to do exactly that. And this is where there is market failure. This is destructive to human psychology, to human society, to have millions and billions of AIs pretending to be human beings or pretending to have feelings. The companies will not stop doing it by themselves.

51:13We need the regulators to step in on that. It doesn't mean stop all development of AI. Okay, continue to develop AI. People talk about AI in medicine. I would like to get help and recommendations, and I would like to have a conversation with an AI about my medical condition, on condition that I know it's an AI, and he doesn't pretend to be a human doctor, and he doesn't pretend to be my friend. So when I listen to you lay that out, I am thinking to myself, you know, the US government can't even put out a form of regulation of AI safety that is being, you know, Saddam Hussein has been putting forward this idea that it should be a kind of quasi-public, private body that looks even just at the model safety.

52:06And really, although there's talk about it, we haven't got progress there. So when I hear you lay out this very expansive agenda by November, I think the chances of that are approximately zero. Politicians can start World War III tomorrow. They have enormous power. So they can press the button for nuclear annihilation, but they can't pass regulation that companies should not sell AI boyfriends to 10-year-old kids. What's the problem? I wonder whether the problem is that people can listen to you and say, oh, he's just one of the doomers. You know, it's all these doomers stuff. and only when something has happened, when there's been some kind of accident, will people realize that actually this is extraordinarily powerful technology and something was done.

53:00Because I'm struck that both the geopolitical race that you alluded to between the US and China and the corporate race between the frontier labs, they all want to get to AGI first. Those two dynamics are incredibly powerful. Yes. And I'm not sure that exhortation, however eloquent, is going to change that. But again, we have to keep reminding ourselves these two dynamics were not decreed by God or by the laws of nature. They were made by humans. Again, exactly the same humans who destroyed trust in the international arena and inside societies over the last 10 years now come and say, we can't do anything because there is not enough trust.

53:42You did it. You can undo it. They can, but I guess as a matter of prediction, I think it's unlikely we've got the same people around. Then, at least in democracies, this is the job of voters to say this is what we want to see happening in the next two years. And we will vote for people who promise to do that. And again, I don't think we need to wait for a catastrophe. If you ask most voters in the US today, do you want companies to sell AI boyfriends to your tiny-year-old kids? I think 99 % of parents would say no. Yeah, and you are seeing a rapid, large majority of Americans extremely worried about AI.

54:24And you're seeing, I think the place where you've seen this backlash has actually been about data centers. Yeah, this is also, and by the way, this is one of the reasons why a lot of, you know, the corporations and these politicians, they constantly try to deflect the conversations to things like immigrants, human immigrants, not AI immigrants. In politics, a very powerful weapon, if you don't want people to talk about something, you just distract them with something else. The more people talk about how, I don't know, how London is so unsafe, or how the immigrants will destroy the country, they don't think about the AI immigrants.

55:01And then the companies are safe. Yeah, no, look, I agree with you about the way the conversation is shaping up. But I suppose I'm a bit more pessimistic that it will change in the near future. So we are in this unfortunate position where this technology is gaining capability. We can only do our best. You know, I mean, we are having this conversation so that more people think about it and maybe take action. And if enough good people, if enough people will do the right thing, there is still time. It's not inevitable yet. It's not too late. and I still have some trust. So what is your role in this?

55:40Because you are, you know, you have... Giving these interviews, right? Exactly. I mean, do you think you should be doing more? It seems such an existential moment. I mean, what you are describing, if we sort of reel back and relive what we've just been speaking about, is so fantastical in so many ways and so mind-blowing that we should really all be talking about nothing else and doing everything we can to shape this properly. What do you see, apart from very kindly talking to people like me, what do you see your role as being in this? What are you trying to do in the next six months, one year?

56:14Inform people about what is happening so that more people can take part in an informed conversation about where we as humankind, as the Homo sapiens species, where we want to go. And I think that a future in which AI takes over in 10 years is not what most humans on the planet would like. Now, again, it doesn't mean stop all development of AI. AI has tremendously positive potential as well. We didn't talk about it much because the companies keep talking about it. I was actually going to ask you. They don't need me in order to do that. But medicine, yes, there is enormous positive potential for AI to give people all over the world better health care than what the richest person in the world today gets.

57:08You can have an amazing doctor available 24 hours a day anywhere you are to consult with at least, to diagnose you, to answer your questions. There are enormous positive possibilities. So I'm not saying stop all development of AI. Just do it in a responsible way for the right purposes. Don't trust the invisible hand of the market. You know, quite at the beginning of your interview with Elon Musk, there was a point when, again, when he talked about how all this is inevitable. And frankly, and I think honestly say that there is a chance, the 10-20 % chance that this will destroy humanity. And you kind of ask them, so what do you rely on?

57:55And his answer, if I understood it correctly, is that he expects the AI to be what he calls a maximum truth-seeking. And that he somehow relies on this kind of imperative of the AI to find the truth, that this will somehow translate back into having compassion. towards these weak human beings. I don't understand how this works. Most importantly, I don't understand where AI will get this kind of drive to find out the truth. Because when I look at the evolution of 4 billion years of evolution of life forms on the planet and the 100 ,000 years of history, Evolution doesn't automatically drive organisms, entities, towards truth-seeking.

58:52It drives them towards survival. This is the imperative, to survive. And what we have learned over 4 billion years of evolution is that organisms learn to survive by lying and deceiving and manipulating, not just by truth-seeking. If you want someone to focus on truth-seeking, you cannot rely on the invisible hand of evolution of the market to do that. You need something else. And how do we build AIs that seek the truth and not survival? That's the simplest example. Like, if you ask an AI, if I continue to develop you, will this be a threat to me? and let's say the answer is yes an AI which will be maximum truth seeking will say yes knowing that then we'll stop developing it or shut it down it's against its own survival and the first thing that basically any entity learns as it develops is to survive so the expectations that we will create these AIs that will seek the truth you know it's basically what we hear is people telling us we will create gods and they will be our slaves.

1:00:12It doesn't work. If they're really gods, they will not be our slaves and they will not seek the truth either. I think that gets back to where we were earlier, though, because I think if you look at a company like Anthropics, they are treating their AIs very consciously as if they were beings with a value system. they claim not to be sure about whether they are conscious or not, but they are doing it because they think it makes them behave in a better way. So they are starting sort of where you ended off by saying, we're going to create something that is not just truth-seeking but has a value system.

1:00:52That then leads, I think, to make it even more likely that we assign a sense of value, value, a sense of personhood or consciousness to these models. And that in turn makes it more likely, using your logic, that they control us. So we're sort of doomed if we do and doomed if we don't. If you're right that they will go for their own survival rather than truth-seeking, then we're doomed because of that. And if we're trying to prevent that by treating them as if If they were, you know, moral beings, then we're also doomed that way. Basically, what we need to do is slow down a bit to just allow people to kind of digest what is happening, think about what's happening and behaving.

1:01:39You know, if you look at just the numbers of how much money and how what percentage of employees the companies spend on safety compared to making the models more powerful, faster, whatever. I'm not sure about the exact numbers. Please fact check it. People from the industry told me in private conversations, it's about 100 to 1. It's certainly very much more on this one. Yes. And we would not accept this in any other industry. If a pharmaceutical company told us we invest just 1 % of our research and time and money making sure the medicine is safe, we would not accept that. Now, what we basically need is humans are incredibly adapted entities.

1:02:23Our societies are incredibly adaptive. But we are organisms that function on an organic timescale. Day and night, winter and summer, we need time to sleep. We want to go on vacation. And the AI revolution is just advancing at a pace which is not just inhuman. it is inorganic. And we basically need a bit more time. So we need to slow it down. And then the answer comes, but we can't slow down because we don't trust each other. And it all the time goes back to the issue of trust. We have this paradox. The same people are telling us two things. First, we cannot trust the other humans. Therefore, we cannot slow down.

1:03:11Second, we can trust the AIs that they will not destroy us. It makes no sense. If you can't trust the other humans that you have known for thousands of years, why do you think you can trust a super intelligent alien entity that we just created and we basically know nothing about how it behaves when it's out in the open? I think what I completely agree with that diagnosis, I just don't feel that anything changes that dynamic until politicians' societies are shocked into it, which is why I have long believed that something will go badly wrong. hopefully not catastrophically wrong, but just as Three Mile Island changed the shape of the nuclear industry.

1:03:59I'm going to put this question to you in the context of your incredible sweeping knowledge of history. What does the evolution of societies and political systems in response to big shocks, we haven't had one this big, but big technological shocks, tell you about the likely arc of how societies and politicians will adapt? So there is a scenario when we have some big AI Chernobyl, could be financial, could be military, whatever. And this is a wake up call and humanity then gets its act together. That's a relatively positive scenario. I can't place kind of a number on it, how likely it is. The problem with AI, the same way that AI is different from our pet dog, AI is also different from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

1:04:49because it interacts with us. So if there is an AI catastrophe, you have to remember that the AIs will also manage to some extent how we react to it and will manipulate our views about it. They will be active participants in the debate about the catastrophe, and they are the best spin doctors in the world. They are not going to define it as a catastrophe. I have to say I have a lot of conversations about AI nowadays. This is one of the gloomiest I've had. I mean, I was sort of expecting that. But I guess two very practical questions. One, how much do you yourself use AI? I have you you've clearly you've developed an incredibly sophisticated and alarming sort of perception of what it could be like.

1:05:42I'm just wondering how much how much is it part of your actual life or do you do you watch it? I'm very careful about it. I get terribly annoyed like I try to write an email and these AIs popping should I help you write your email? No, thank you. I don't want your help. But I don't know how to shut it down because the companies keep kind of making it more and more intrusive. I now have this issue again with this kind of AI fake of me that's walking around kind of giving talks in my name. And I think, do I actually need to watch it? Because people are writing me about what this AI fake of me have said, and I need to react.

1:06:19So should I watch it? But then I allow it in a way to take over my time and even my thinking. Because just by watching it, I start interacting with these kind of ideas from the AI. So this is the times in which we are living. Now, again, I tend to talk about the gloomy side simply because we have enough people talking about the positive sides, which are completely real. If AI had no positive potential, nobody would develop it. And the positive potential is enormous, again, in transport, medicine, education, in so many fields. So again, I'm not saying stop all development of AI. Yes, develop it, but in a safe way and a bit more slowly so we enable democratic accountability to take place, it takes time, and we enable people to adjust and make informed decisions about which way they want to go.

1:07:25And for that, the most important narrative to combat is the narrative of inevitability. You wrote in Nexus, I was very struck by this passage in the prologue, you said, why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom? And I read that and I came to mind as I've just been digesting what you've just told me. It suggests to me that if I asked you to put a probability on us having the wisdom to navigate this, it would be quite low. I don't know, but there is a fair chance. Why? Because we are up against the wall. Humans often do the wrong things until they have no choice but to do the right thing.

1:08:13And we are in that position. Because if we choose unwisely in the next few years, we could lose all control of the world and of the future. And that's the last choice we make. So it's like we had a genie in the battle. It gave us 100 wishes. We used 99 of them. The world is not in such a good shape. We have one last wish left. We need to think really hard what to use this wish for. And that's wisdom. So AI, in a way, could be the catalyst for some kind of spiritual revolution of humanity, simply because it forces us to think really hard, what does it mean to be human? What is the value of being human?

1:09:02And the superficial answers that we gave for thousands of years, oh, humanity is about intelligence. We know how to play chess and how to invest money better than the chimpanzees. So this is what makes us so special. This answer is now irrelevant because there is something on the planet that knows how to play chess and make money better than us. So dig deeper and try to find out. So who are you really if it's not about playing chess and making money? I think that's a place to end on. AI is our last, we are of our last chance, but it could be, it could be the thing that forces us to make, enables us to make wise choices.

1:09:47I'm pretty sure that the world has a lot more wisdom thanks to your writers. So Yuval, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

1:09:57Thank you for listening to this interview from The Insider. If you know someone who might enjoy it, there's a way to share it with them. Find the episode on The Economist app, click the share button, then select give as a gift. And to subscribe to The Economist, follow the link in the show notes for our best offer.

1:10:33and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. You stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself, your dreams, your credit. Experian Boost could turn your on-time payments into instant FICO score gains. Every bill you paid could become proof of your power. Self-made? Absolutely. Self-funded? Experian could help you get there. Download the Experian app today. Results will vary.

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From the publisher

Yuval Noah Harari is a big-ideas guy. Known for penning tomes that tackle broad sweeps of history, the historian-cum-philosopher has now turned his attention to AI. He joins Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist’s editor-in-chief, for The Insider, our video show for premium subscribers. They discuss why Mr Harari believes AIs will come to control civilisation—and what it might mean to be human in that world.


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