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

24:19Like if you say, ah, the only problem I have in life, I don't have enough money and you spend 10 years getting a lot of money and you're still not happy because you did not understand that lack of money was not the only source of misery in your life. You had other issues in relationships, whatever, that you can't solve with money. If you don't know the truth about yourself and about humans in general, you will never be happy. So people want to know the truth. And if this is true of me, why do you think other people are different from you? Why do you think the journalists, the scientists, they are power crazy demons?

24:52I'm not. I'm really interested in the truth. But all these journalists and historians and whatever, they are power crazy demons. No, they are like you. Yes, again, to some extent, all people want power, but all people also want to know the truth. In every institution, there are problems. There is corruption because institutions are made of humans, not of angels. But that's why good institutions have self-correcting mechanisms to identify and correct their own mistakes, their own crimes, their own corruption. And this is also why we keep a lot of different institutions that keep each other in check.

25:29If there is corruption in the courts, the journalists are supposed to expose it. If there is corruption in the newspapers, it's the business of the courts and of academics to expose it. Again, if there is corruption in the universities, so you have other institutions that can keep that in check. Is it perfect? No. But do you know of any perfect system? If you just go around distrusting everything, what you get in the end is a totalitarian dictatorship. Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking is it sounds like populism starts off kind of masking itself as the will of the people, but then it always ends in totalitarianism because the trust is gone.

26:07And I'm thinking about places like North Korea or Russia, Venezuela, where they just have friends in Belarus and they say things like, oh yeah, we just don't have that here. But my friend went to the doctor and he said, I have this, but I really need to see another doctor. So I've got to fly to, I forget where, some other country. And I said, can't you just go to another doctor in Minsk? And he said, no, you really don't want to, you can't really look at Belarusian doctors because they only give you a few different diagnoses and this could be serious. And I was just thinking, imagine going to a doctor and it's a coin flip as to whether or not what they tell you is actually legitimate because the training is so bad and nobody trusts the medical system.

26:47In such a system, when trust collapses, then Belarus is run by a dictator. Again, the dictator doesn't need people to trust him or the institutions. It's terror that keeps society together. The other trick of populists, I mean, the very term populist, where does it come from? So populist comes from the Latin term populus, which simply means people, the people. It starts with a very attractive idea, which is the basic democratic idea that the people are the source of all authority. The people should appoint the government. The people should rule. And this is something which is accepted by everybody in a democracy.

27:29But then the question becomes, who are the people? 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. And this is what you hear in extreme cases, you know, like in Nazi Germany. So the Nazis would say anybody who doesn't support Hitler is not really a German. He's a Jew. He's a communist. He's a traitor. He's an alien. The key point of populists, which makes them dangerous, is that they don't think about the people as a collection of people, of individuals, of persons with different views and interests and so forth.

28:19No, they think about the people as this kind of mystical unified body, which has a single will, the will of the people. Now, how do you know what is the will of the people? You don't go around asking actual human beings, because then you get different answers. This person says one thing, this person says another thing. But according to the populace, no, the people have just one will. So how do you know it? You have the leader. The leader is supposedly has some mystical connection to the people and the leader knows what the people desire. Now, if you come and say, no, but I'm part of the people and I think differently than the leader, then they tell you no.

29:01If you think differently than the leader, this proves you are not really part of the people. Yeah, this is like Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un type of North Korea stuff. Like he knows better than everybody else. And if you disagree with him, you must be an enemy of the state. Exactly. In democracy, yes, the people rules, but the people is never a unified entity. The people is millions of persons with different interests and views. And this is why we have elections. Sometimes this party wins, sometimes that party wins. And there is never unanimity. In a real democracy, there is a plurality of opinions.

29:36There is a conversation. When you say, no, the people has just one will and anybody who doesn't fall in line, this means they're just not part of the people, then it's no longer a democracy. It still calls itself democracy. It still says, oh, we rule in the name of the people. But all these communist dictatorships, they call themselves popular democracies or the people's republic. People's democratic. Whenever they add people's democratic, you know it's like a dictatorship with no freedom whatsoever. Exactly. The more they have to really highlight and bold those words, the less free the place is.

30:11Exactly. Yeah, that's always the case, eh? Money's not just a story. You can use it to get your hands on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of the circle of people that I know, like, and trust, otherwise known as a network, but everybody hates that word. I'm teaching you how to build that same circle for yourself over at 6minutenetworking.com. It is not cringy. This is not some sort of awkward, glad-handy type course. It takes a few minutes a day, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course.

30:43So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Yuval Noah Harari. So fascinated by this, but I want to be conscious of time here a little bit. I would love to discuss AI. Of course, a bunch of people are worried about that, thinking about that these days. Nexus devotes quite a bit of shrift to AI as well. and you give this the idea of how AI defeated the CAPTCHA. I would love to hear about this because that was mildly terrifying, I will say. It's a kind of very small example of what AI can do. When OpenAI, they developed GPT-4, that was like two years ago.

31:23They wanted to test what can this thing do. So they gave it to another company that specializes in these tests to test what can it do. It gave GPT-4 the test of solving CAPTCHA puzzles. CAPTCHA puzzles are these visual puzzles when you try to log on to your bank account or to some website, and the website wants to know if you're a human or a robot. So you need to, they'll have this visual image of some twisted words or numbers or something you need to identify, or if there is a cat in the image or whatever. Right, oh yeah, drag the puzzle piece to where it belongs in the photo. There's that one too.

31:58All kinds of things like that. This is a line of defense against bot attacks. So they wanted to know, can GPT-4 overcome this? Now, GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA by itself. It doesn't have this capability. But could it perhaps manipulate a human in order to overcome it? So they didn't give it access directly to the internet, but with the help of the researchers, they connected it to a TaskRabbit website, which is a place you can hire people to do things for you online. They sponsor this show, actually. Oh, okay. But don't let that influence what we're going to discuss. I'll deal with the fallout from this.

32:35Yeah, and so GPT-4, with the help of the researchers, it hired a human to solve the CAPTCHA puzzle for it. And it told the human, please, can you help me solve this CAPTCHA puzzle? Then comes the interesting bit. The human task rabbit worker became suspicious. Oh. And he asked GPT-4, why do you need somebody to solve CAPTCHA puzzle for you? are you a robot? They asked the trillion dollar question, are you a robot? And GPT-4 answered, no, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment, which is why I can't solve the capture and I need your help. And this is a very small example, but it shows us the capability of AI to manipulate humans to achieve its goals.

33:25And when you amplify this experiment, when you think what it means, we see it already in the world, changing the structures of human society. And this is not some future science fiction scenario. Democracies all over the world are currently in crisis. They are undermined because of manipulations by AI. Social media algorithms are currently the most powerful editors in the world. Democracy is a conversation. And who controls the conversation? To a large extent, it's the editors of the large media. You know, the editors of the newspapers, the televisions, and so forth. And today, the most important media outlets are social media.

34:14Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all that. Now, who decides what you see on TikTok? Who decides the algorithm? And the algorithm, like with this TaskRabbit example, they manipulate now millions and basically billions of people for their purposes. And what are their purposes? The purpose given to the social media algorithms by the companies is to maximize user engagement. This is the business model. The more people are engaged, the more time they spend on TikTok, on Twitter, whatever, on YouTube, the more money the companies make. So they gave the algorithms the task of increase user engagement the same way they gave GPT-4 the task, solve the CAPTCHAs.

35:02And just as GPT-4 solved the CAPTCHA by manipulating a human, so also social media algorithms. They increase user engagement by manipulating billions of people around the world. They discovered the algorithms by trial and error, by experimenting on millions of people, that the easiest way to capture people's attention is by spreading outrage, by pressing the fear button, the hate button, the greed button in people's minds. And this is what they began to do already 10 years ago and more. And this has destabilized democracies all over the world. It is destroying the democratic conversation. Now, democracy in essence is a conversation.

35:47Dictatorships is dictate. One person dictates everything. Democracy is a conversation. And now we have the most sophisticated information technology in history. And yet the conversation is breaking down. People can't talk to each other. People can't listen. They can't hold a reasoned debate. They can't agree on any facts. Why? Because one, it's not the only reason, but the main reason is because the algorithms are manipulating us in the same way that GPT-4 manipulated the task rabbit worker. Yeah, this is, Rene DiResta was on the show, I'm sure you probably know who she is, and she was mentioning that we exist in these bespoke realities where before, 20 years ago, you read this article in the New York Times, I read that article in the New York Times.

36:33Maybe he read another article in the LA Times that was sort of similar, but was missing some information and had some different information. So that conversation was largely similar, even if we disagreed with each other. Now, you found something on TikTok, and I found something on TikTok. They said the complete opposite thing, and they had totally different sources or no sources at all. And so now I think this is exactly how this happened, and I cannot even fathom why you would disagree with that or have different information, because it doesn't make any sense. So the only logical conclusion is you're either lying or making it up or you are just mainlining craziness and I have the truth because I'm not thinking, wow, I'm being fed a bunch of bullshit constantly.

37:11I need to stop it, right? Most people don't want that, but they're being fed something where they said, I watched 100 TikToks and they all said something similar. I don't even maybe believe that you also watched 100 TikToks and they said something similar, but the complete opposite. And we can go into this conversation about social media algorithms, But I mean, I just gave it as an example. Look what immense influence very, very primitive AIs already have on human society. And it should be clear, this is very primitive AIs. The algorithms controlling TikTok and YouTube and all that, they are just the first baby step in the development of AI.

37:50AI is basically like 10 years old. and it can continue to develop for centuries, for thousands of years, for millions of years. Like the evolution of organic animals, we now have an evolutionary process of inorganic AIs. And this is just the beginning. Now, for organic animals, it took billions of years to get from amoebas and microorganisms to dinosaurs and mammals and humans. But digital evolution is millions of times faster. So if ChagPT and GPT-4 and all these social media algorithms, they are the amoebas, just imagine how AIT-Rex would look like. And we are likely to encounter AIT-Rex not in 2 billion years, but maybe in 20 years, because it's a completely different pace for digital evolution.

38:45And that's the big question. It's not how do we deal with social media algorithms. Again, we can have this discussion. It's important. Different show. But it's a much more important thing to realize. This is just the first taste. Like you got these extremely primitive AIs and look what it did. It still lied to TaskRabbit and found a way around the capture. And they didn't train it to lie. They just didn't do your thing. Yeah. And it did its thing. And this thing was lying and making a human do the thing that it couldn't do. That's crazy. And the most important thing I think everybody should know about AI, the one thing everybody should know is that AI is not a tool.

39:18it is an agent. A tool is something in your hands. A hammer is a tool. An atom bomb is a tool. I mean, you can use an atom bomb to destroy this city or that city. It's your choice. You decide to start a war and who to bomb and whatever. Yeah, it doesn't walk over there and decide to detonate itself. Exactly. AI can do that. AI can make decisions by itself. We already have autonomous weapon systems making decisions by themselves. And AI can even invent new weapons. An atom bomb could not invent the hydrogen bomb. But AIs can invent new weapons and ultimately even new AIs. Of course, there is enormous positive potential.

40:00Otherwise, we wouldn't develop it. AI can invent new medicines. You can have AI doctors providing billions of people around the world with much, much better healthcare than what people receive today. I'm not saying, oh, we should stop all development of AI. No. The key question is how do we enable the positive potential of AI to flower while avoiding the really existential risks that this technology poses? I mean, how do you even begin to answer that question? I think you said somewhere, and again, paraphrasing, chatbots and AI might be the end of history. That's a little alarming coming from an historian.

40:39Yeah. If you think what history is, history is the interaction between culture and biology. We have a biological process lasting billions of years that brought us here. History is just, you know, 50 ,000 years old, more or less. History is not just biology, it's also culture. History begins when people start inventing stories, mythologies, religions, political ideologies, autistic traditions. And then history is this dance between culture and biology. Like we have biological urges. We need food. But culture shapes different cuisines. We have French cuisine and Indian cuisine. You have food taboos.

41:21Jews are not allowed to eat pork. Muslims are not allowed to drink wine. So culture interacts with biology. It's the same with sex. We have our sexual urges. This comes from biology. and then every culture has its own sexual norms and what you're encouraged to do, what you're not allowed to do. This is the dance. This is history. Now what happens is that AI is taking over culture. More and more, the texts, the images, the videos, eventually the stories, the mythologies, the currencies, the political ideologies will come not from human minds, but from non-human intelligence. I see. You know, again, it's just 10 years since the beginning of the AI revolution.

42:05We already have AIs being able to produce texts more sophisticated than most humans are able to write. They're already able to produce videos. They're already able to translate from one language to another. And this is just 10 years. You know, another 10 years and perhaps most of the cultural artifacts around us, you know, from movies to currencies, they will be produced by AI. Now, I'm not saying this is terrible, this is evil, this is bad. Let's hold a moment before we kind of rush to make judgment. Is it good or bad? Just stop and reflect on what it means that after tens of thousands of years in which we lived inside human culture, we are about to enter a new era in which we live inside, to a large extent, non-human culture.

43:01One way to think about it, again, it's like aliens coming from another planet and taking over our planet and starting to, you know, from producing better medicines and giving us medical advice to writing our poems and producing our movies and our political ideologies. Interesting. And of course, AI doesn't come from another planet. It comes from this planet we created. But in many ways, it is an alien intelligence. I mean, the very acronym AI, traditionally, it stood for artificial intelligence. But I think it's better to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence. Again, alien, not in the sense that it's from Mars, but in the sense it makes decisions.

43:44It invents ideas that are fundamentally alien to the human mind. And maybe I'll give another famous example from the game of Go. Yes, perfect. One of the key moments in the history of the AI revolution was in 2016, when an AI program called AlphaGo defeated the South Korean Go champion, Lee Sedol. In America, it's not big, but in East Asia, it's huge. It's a strategy game, much more complex than chess. It looks like Othello for people who know what that is, right? Again, it was invented in ancient China more than 2 ,000 years ago and was considered a kind of cultural treasure, not just in China, also in Korea, Japan.

44:29Like if you are an educated, civilized Japanese or Chinese person today or 1 ,000 years ago, you learn to play Go. And for 2 ,000 years, tens of millions of people in East Asia played Go. they came up with all kinds of strategies and philosophies, how to play this game, which was seen as a metaphor for life, which was seen as a good preparation to be a politician, to act in the world. And people thought they knew how to play Go. And then AlphaGo came along. And it's not just that it defeated Lee Sedol. It crushed Lee Sedol with strategies that were just totally alien. When it first played, the human commentators, who are expert Go players, they said, this is nonsense.

45:16I mean, this AI program, it makes mistakes like a little child. I mean, nobody plays Go like that. And then it turned out that it was actually a brilliant strategy. Now what we understand is that you can imagine Go as a kind of planet, as a geography, as a landscape, the planet Go, all the way you can play Go. And for more than 2 ,000 years, humans were stuck on one island on planet Go. They explored for 2 ,000 years only a small island in the landscape of all the possible ways you can play Go. And they didn't understand it. They thought they knew the whole planet. And then, because our minds are limited, we think only in certain ways about reality.

45:57And then AlphaGo came along, and it discovered entire new continents on this planet Go. because it doesn't think like a human. It's not limited by the limitations of our brains and our evolutionary process. Now, if this is just go, you say, well, it doesn't matter, it's just a game. So, okay, so it knows to play go better. But what if the same thing happens in art, in politics, in finance, in religion? And it could be good, it's not necessarily bad, but before we rush to make judgment, just understand the kind of historical implications of having another super intelligence on the planet that can make independent decisions, can invent new stuff, and can do so in ways which are really alien to the way we make decisions and invent new ideas.

46:53On the plus side, right, it might be great to have something reformulate plastic so that it is completely safe to throw into the ground and it turns into beautiful potting soil after a year, but it doesn't disintegrate when you want it outside and protect it against the rain. But what happens when crucial decisions for humanity, like banking policy or something, are decided by AI, but then we don't really understand how it's doing that? How can we get inside those black boxes? Do we know why AlphaGo changed? I think it was called Move 37. Move 37, yeah. Do we know why it does that? Or do we just go, wow, that was brilliant.

47:28And why did you do that? And it goes, I don't know. I'm just really smart. It played millions of games against itself, basically, and it spotted patterns that we didn't spot. You know, the whole issue about explanations, like people now say, okay, we need a right to an explanation. Like you apply to a bank to get a loan, increasingly it's an AI deciding whether it will give you a loan or not. Let's say the AI says, no, don't give this person a loan. So in some places, like the European Union, there is now regulation that the human deserves an explanation. There is a right to an explanation. If the bank said, no, I deserve to know.

48:08Why not? What's wrong with me? And then this sounds like a good idea. The problem is that the explanation will not be this kind of one line. Okay, it's because of your ethnicity or your gender or your previous credit history. No, the way AI makes decisions, it goes over enormous amounts of data about you and spots patterns in the data. So if the bank really wants to give an explanation, they will send you a book with a million pages. It'll look like a copy of one of your books. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the explanation. This is, again, this is what makes it alien. That humans usually make these decisions on the basis of just one or two data points.

48:49Sure. Which is why we get problems with racism and homophobia and so forth, because someone looks at you, ignores all the other data about you, just looks at your skin color and says, okay, I won't give this person a loan. And this is something we can fight against. Right. Now, the AI doesn't work like that. It doesn't work on the basis of a single data point. It can be racist, but it's racist in a much, much more complicated way. Sure. And it goes over millions of data points about you, spots patterns in this data, and based on that makes its decision. And for us, it's very difficult to understand how it made the decision.

49:30Right. Yeah. We can't really parse all of that. When it says, well, we notice you only shave on days where you have a podcast on video, and then there's 100 ,000 little things like that. And it says, so we've sort of just decided that you're one thousandth of a percent too risky for us. It's like, wait a minute. And then you've got to unpack those things. Well, how does that reflect on this? We don't really know. We just know that other people who only shave three times a week, they don't pay their bills on time. Exactly. And you have, again, there's millions of data points and it's not the way humans make these decisions.

50:00But increasingly, this is the way that AIs make decisions. Again, it's banks, it's warfare. Like if you look now at the war in Gaza, there was a huge argument about it. We can get into this argument. But we know that AI is now being used to select the targets. Oh, really? Yes. Like when they decide to bomb a certain building and say, oh, this is a Hamas headquarter, let's bomb it. Very, very often it's an AI that was involved, at least in the decision-making process. There is a huge argument. I don't know what the answer is. To what extent humans are still involved in the decision-making process?

50:36I 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. I don't know. But everybody agrees that we are at a stage when basically AIs can, if they are given authority, they can now call the shots, literally. That you can now have armies bombing buildings, bombing people based on decisions made by AI. Now, one camp says, yes, The AI goes over enormous amounts of information. Based on its own calculations, it identifies a certain building as a target and tells you bomb that building.

51:19But we don't listen just to the AI. After it told us to bomb the building, we have human analysts going over all the information, making sure that this is correct before we bomb. Yeah. That's one version. The other version says, no, no, no, it's not like that. They just do what the AI tells them. Oh, geez. I don't know who is right. I'm not sure to what extent humans are still in the loop, but technically, this is everybody agrees, that technically we are already in an era when you can run a war with an AI system deciding what to bomb and who to kill. It's now an ethical question, do we want to do it or not?

51:58And of course, that's only a hop, skip and a jump away from, if we don't have human oversight because we don't need it and it just delays everything, then we don't even need to have a human push the trigger, just have the AI do it. Yeah. Time is a crucial element because even people who say, you know, this is very dangerous to just give an AI the authority to bomb people. We need humans to go over all the data. But then other people say, yes, but this takes a lot of time. For an AI, it takes like two minutes. For human analysts, it can take like two days. By the time they finish all the analysis, maybe the terrorists are gone.

52:31And then you get to another stage when both sides have access to this technology. So if you have some future war, let's say between NATO and Russia, and both sides have AI weapons, and one side just gives the AI the authority, you spot a target, just shoot. And the other side said, no, no, no, no, no. We need humans to verify everything. And so you have, it's an unequal battle. Like you have two drones. by the time the humans give the one drone the authority to shoot, it's blown by the other drone. So just the element of time, this is really, really crucial because it's not just in warfare, it's in everything.

53:11Humans are organic and we work by cycles and compared to AI, we are very slow. We need to rest. We need to sleep day and night, winter and summer. We are organic, we live by organic cycles. AI is not organic. It doesn't live by cycles. It never needs any rest. It doesn't need to sleep. It doesn't care if it's day or night. It doesn't care if it's winter or summer. It's always on. And in this competition, the question is, would the AI adapt to us and slow down? Or would we have to kind of ramp up and speed and speed and speed until we collapse. And again, think about finance with which we began.

53:53Wall Street originally was a human institution, an organic institution, which take rests. Yeah, you have the guys yelling on the floor, and then when it's five, they throw everything up in the air and walk out, right? Yeah, they go home, they go to their families, they go to have a beer, they sleep. The market is open, as far as I know, 9.30 in the morning to four o 'clock in the afternoon, Mondays to Fridays, that's it. And it's also closed on Christmas and Martin Luther King Day and several other days. And this is human. Now, if you give AIs control of finance, which is happening, so AIs don't need to rest and they don't have holidays.

54:29So you have 24 hours, 365 days a year cycle, and either the humans get out or if they want to stay in the game, they need to give up their private life, their sleep, their family, and eventually they collapse and die. And this is part of the dilemma we are facing that how do we make AI slow down instead of us running faster and faster until we collapse? And when I talk with the people in the industry, they are aware of the problems, but they all give the same answer. We can't slow down because the competitors won't slow down. Like everybody will tell you, we would love to slow down. Like OpenAI would say, we would love to slow down.

55:12But then the other companies, how can we trust them that they don't fast forward? How can we trust the Chinese? And then you have this paradox that the humans can't trust each other. We are unable to solve the problem of human trust. And therefore, we speed up the development of AI. But where is the guarantee we can trust the AI? I mean, you're so suspicious of the other humans, and yet you have so much trust in the AIs. You know, you have AI T-Rex in 20 years, and you think you can control it, you think you can trust it more than you trust the Chinese. Oh, it's our T-Rex. Don't worry. Yeah. This is what they say.

55:53We will design the T-Rex. It will be friendly. As T-Rexes often are, right? Friendly. Friendly and cuddly. Yeah. Before AI enslaves us all, take a moment to support our sponsors. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, those who make the show possible. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well, jordanharbinger.com slash AI.

56:25Worst case scenario, you email me, I am happy to dig up these codes for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. You know he's a big deal because he's got three names. What disturbs me as well is if AI is doing something, for example, AlphaGo, and we can't really understand why, of course we want AI to run, well, I shouldn't say of course. Of course, many people want AI to run our financial system and make it super efficient or other government - Healthcare, for example. But what happens when we don't understand how our healthcare system works at all?

57:03Because that'll eventually happen, right? We just won't be able to do that. Again, that's a danger of, you know, again, this is another version of how democracies collapse. You can still have elections, but if you can't understand most of the decisions the system is making, what is the meaning of choosing this president or that president? Again, take healthcare, like the choices about what treatment to give you or which treatment to give which people. If we don't understand how the AIs are making the decisions, then how do we make sure that it's fair? That there is no element of racism or bias or whatever.

57:36And in more and more areas, the problem is that we just can't understand the decisions that shape our life. And this, I think, brings me to one of the most important and neglected issues in human history, which is bureaucracy. The problems we have with AI is just a magnified version of the problem we had with bureaucracies throughout history. And the problem with bureaucracy, in essence, is that it's alien and boring to most humans. For millions of years of evolution, there were no bureaucratic systems anywhere. Humans lived in small bands. You knew everybody. You understood all the decisions made in the band or in the tribe.

58:16That's it. And in those days, you know, the main stories were mythological. Stories about heroes and gods and ancestral spirits. 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. 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.

59:00So 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. Because, again, they are very recent in evolution. And we don't have many stories about them. without 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, Byzantine. Yeah, Byzantine bureaucracy. Where did that come from, by the way? I know that's a non sequitur, but where did that come from?

59:34Did they just have a complex bureaucracy or did they kind of invent it? 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. And again, the key thing to understand, bureaucracy is not necessarily bad. I mean, we couldn't have large scale systems, countries, cities without them. Lots of people, because you don't understand them, they have these, again, these conspiracy theories. Oh, it's the deep state. When people talk with me about the deep state, I immediately think about the sewage system.

1:00:05The sewage system is the deep state. The literal deep state. Yeah, it's the literal deep state. It's this system of pumps and pipes and canals and reservoirs going under our houses and neighborhoods and streets built by the governments and the municipalities. Who knows what happens there? And you know, you go to the toilet, you do your thing, you flush it down. Where does it go? It goes to the deep state. And it saves our life. It protects us from disease. The sewage system began, or one of the places it began is in 19th century London. For most of history, big cities were the dirtiest and most disease-ridden places on the planet.

1:00:45You cram tens of thousands of people together with their goats and chickens, and with their garbage and sewage, you get paradise for germs. And lots of epidemics. In London in the mid-19th century, there was a cholera epidemic, and people didn't know what was causing this epidemic. There are different theories. Oh, it's enemies poisoning the wells. It's witches. It's whatever. And then you had one, basically, bureaucrat called Jon Snow, 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.

1:01:26So what he did was he just went around London making lists. Anytime he heard about somebody who died from cholera or fell sick with cholera, he would go there. and interview the family, the people, where do you get your drinking water from? Yeah, from the shit-filled well right over here. And he filled these long forms and papers in all this data. And based on that, he pinpointed a certain well in Soho as almost everybody who fell sick from cholera drank water from that well. And when they investigated, they discovered that the well was dug next to a cesspit full of sewage water. And the water from the cesspit simply sipped into the well and people drank it and fell sick.

1:02:13Now, today, if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London or in Los Angeles, you have to fill in so many forms. You have to wait for permits and all this bureaucratic hassle, which saves us from cholera. And this is bureaucracy. And again, people find it difficult to understand, partly because it's boring. It's very difficult to do an interesting Netflix series about the sewage system or about the budget. How does the government decide how to allocate the budget? And then there are all these accountants and so forth. And this inability or difficulty to understand bureaucracy is dangerous, partly because it's fertile ground for conspiracy theories, partly because sometimes bureaucracy is dangerous.

1:02:56And we need to be able to tell the difference between when it acts in our favor and when there is corruption and bias and so forth, 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. Yeah, Skynet or whatever. Skynet, the big computer trying to take over the world. That's not a danger. The danger is millions of AI bureaucrats everywhere, in the banks, in the government, in the armies, making decisions about us without us knowing or being able to understand how the system works and how they make all these decisions.

1:03:39Now, again, it's not necessarily evil. Bureaucracy can work in our favor. But if we don't understand how the system works, how do we make sure that it is benign and not malevolent? That's the big question that we face with AI. Do you know much about China's social credit score system? Speaking of bureaucracy gone wild. I know about social credit systems in general. 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, it might even be like a province thing.

1:04:20I'm not quite sure. Some of my Chinese teachers told me a little bit about how it works. The dystopian element came when, of course, if you don't pay your bills, it's hard to book airline tickets and things like that. It's basically, I mean, social credit system is basically an expansion of money or a new kind of money. When you think about traditional money, gold coins, dollars, even bitcoins, they give value only to specific parts of human reality. Some things you do, like you work, you gain money, you want to buy airline ticket, you pay money, but other things, you go visit your friends, you go visit your grandmother, even you throw trash in the street.

1:04:59This is no monetary value. The idea of the social credit is to monetize everything, to give value to every single thing you do in life. And this is your score. So even things that traditionally were not about money, they're about reputation or status. Suddenly, you get precise points for them. And also anything you want to do, you need to use your social credit for it. So again, it has positive potential in some regards. It could create the most totalitarian, again, systems in history where anything you do impacts your ability to get a job, to gain a loan, to travel. And in a way, you see this not only in China, you see it all over the world, also in the US, because it's a function of surveillance that traditionally only some areas of life were monitored and surveyed.

1:05:56And even in dictatorships, there was privacy. If you live in the Soviet Union, so the KGB can't follow you around all the time. They just don't have enough agents. They tried, but they can't. They tried, but you know, we have 200 million Soviet citizens. they don't have 200 million agents. Even if an agent follows you, what do they do at the end of the day? They write a paper report about you and send it to KGB headquarters in Moscow. So every day they get millions of reports. You need analysts to read them and analyze them. Otherwise, it's just worthless paper. So even if a KGB agent saw you do something, chances are it would just lie in KGB archive, the report about you, and nobody would read it.

1:06:39So now you can monitor everybody all the time. You don't need human agents or analysts. You have the computers, smartphones, cameras, drones, microphones, everywhere. And you have the AIs analyzing all the ocean of information. So this creates the potential for total surveillance. And it can take the form of the social credit system. Again, anything you do, it raises or lowers your score. But it can also, you know, you also have it in the West that you did something legal but stupid in some college party 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It can come to haunt you today when you apply to some job, you run in politics, you want to be a judge, whatever.

1:07:25They will find out this email you wrote 10 years ago, this stupid joke you told 10 years ago. And then the whole of life becomes like this one long job interview. Yes, this is exactly what I'm afraid of. The note you wrote to your college girlfriend, which was a little ham-fisted breakup, is now like you're sitting in front of a judge deciding whether or not you get to be a lawyer. And they're like, why would you write that? I don't remember. Well, we remember, right? Nothing you do is forgotten. And the line between private and public is erased. I mean, And the thing is that in public, we certainly need to kind of police what people say and do.

1:08:07There are limits to what you can do and say in public, but they are different from the limits in private. You know, if you think about politicians, for instance, I think politicians have a right to stupidity in private. Sure. Yeah. Like if you stand in front of the cameras and give a speech to millions of people, your words are like seeds that go into the minds of millions of people. if you plant seeds of hatred in millions of minds, this is very, very dangerous. And this should be restricted. But if you then you're offline, you're just with a couple of close friends and you say something stupid, that's your own business.

1:08:43Nobody should know about it. Nobody should censor you for it. Yeah, that's certainly an interesting perspective and something to consider. I guess when I think about my Chinese teacher telling me that her friend, they use an app called WeChat, which is essentially like WhatsApp or something, but much more comprehensive. She said she was talking to another friend of hers and there was a little badge next to his name and she clicked on it and said something like, this person does not pay back money that he owes to companies or people. I mean, imagine you're just like, hey, Angela, do you want to meet for lunch?

1:09:14Yeah, but you should bring cash because I heard from WeChat that you don't pay your bills, pal. Like, oh, is this a misunderstanding? They were sending it to the wrong house. Well, I don't know, but all I know is you're broke ass better bring some cash. That's kind of a silly example, but it's that kind of perpetual job interview. Yeah. And you know, like in Iran today, this is not science fiction. This is actual reality in Iran. They have the hijab laws, which says that women must always cover their hair when they go out, including even in their own car. Like you take your car somewhere, you must wear the hijab in the car.

1:09:50Now, until recently, they had a big problem in enforcing these laws. Because what do you do? You place a policeman on every street corner to make sure that all the women cover their hair and whatever. And now they have AIs. They have these surveillance cameras all over the place. And this is daily occurrences that a woman would go in her car without a veil, without a hijab, and some surveillance camera would identify that this is a woman. She doesn't wear the hijab, identify who she is, and immediately, automatically, It doesn't go to a judge. It doesn't go to any policeman, nothing. The AI immediately sends an order to impound the car.

1:10:29You broke the hijab law, stop the car. And she gets it to her phone. And if she doesn't obey, she's in real trouble. And you don't need the human policeman anymore. It's now being policed by the AIs. And people say the same thing can happen in the US with abortion. If you think that abortion is murder, like millions of Americans think, then wouldn't you use AI to stop murder? Wouldn't you build a countrywide surveillance system that monitors if women are pregnant and suddenly are not pregnant? Oh, interesting. So it's not just a problem for the Iranian women. It can arrive here very quickly. Yeah, I had not thought of that.

1:11:07That would be, I mean, they would have to do that at the federal level. I guess they wouldn't going inside and outside of a state. Didn't you leave the state pregnant? I mean, you came back with no baby. So what'd you do over there in California? You I mean, that could be really scary. And the technology is there. Yeah. Again, to do it with human agents, very, very difficult. But to do it with all these cameras and microphones and smartphones everywhere, very easy. There's also the data issue, right? Before we had the iron curtain, right? And now we kind of have, I think you've made this term, the silicon curtain.

1:11:39Yeah, I like that. Because the question becomes, hey, does our data go to Beijing? Does it go to Silicon Valley? Which one is worse? Aren't they both kind of bad? you have a set of rules that maybe people should listen to when they're creating these things. Not that I have any hope that they will actually listen to your suggestions, but I like them. Yeah. And when we come to what we can do, the first thing to understand, technology is not deterministic. It's not like you create a technology. There is only one way it can go. In the 20th century, we had electricity and radio and cars, and we had the Soviet Union, and we had the United States using the same technology.

1:12:12So also in the 21st century, just creating AI doesn't mean there is just one future. There are choices to be made, and we had better make wise choices while we still have the power. It's impossible to regulate in advance all the different dangers and threats because this is developing very fast. So I think we shouldn't think in terms of rigid regulations. We should think in terms of creating living institutions that are staffed by some of the best human talent and have the resources to first of understand what is happening, you know, that we don't have just to trust the companies or a few governments, but we have an independent, maybe international institution that can tell people all over the world what is really happening with AI.

1:12:58And this would be the basis for a public debate about what we should do. But first, we need to understand. And then there are always regulations that to some extent we can agree on. Like just to give two examples, because we don't have a lot of time. So one key regulation is that corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms. The same way that if you produce a car and the car malfunctions, this is the fault of Ford or General Motors or whatever, should be the same with technology. Again, it should be very clear. I'm not saying that companies should be liable for the actions of their users.

1:13:33Like if your YouTube and some human user uploaded a conspiracy theory to YouTube, I don't think I should be very, very careful before YouTube censors humans. Very careful about that. But if the YouTube algorithm then deliberately recommends and autoplays this video to millions of people to increase human user engagement, to make more money for YouTube, this is on YouTube. I see. This is not on the user that created it. This is the decision of the algorithm, and the company should be responsible for that. So that's one regulation. The other is that we should ban counterfeit humans, fake humans.

1:14:15Bots, essentially? Yes. I mean, bots that masquerade as human beings. I see. AIs are welcome to communicate with us as long as they identify as AIs. But if you talk with a doctor online, and it pretends to be a human doctor, a human being, but it's actually an AI that's very, very dangerous. So, okay, let's talk with the AI. 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 went, yeah, that's all correct. He's not trying to kill you. Right. Or that there's some liability for that person. Yeah. I can get behind that.

1:14:49I know we're out of time. And as an experiment, I'm going to end this interview by asking you a question that I asked chat GPT. Oh, to ask. How do I end an interview with Yuval Noah Harari? And of course, it gave me a long explanation that I didn't really need. But the question is, if you could send a message to humanity that would be read a thousand years from now, what would it be? Yeah. Let me think about it. Yeah, go for it. Make sure you're solving the right problems. I mean, humans are very good in solving problems, but they often focus on the wrong problems. It's been happening for thousands of years.

1:15:22We are solving problem after problem, And the situation just seems to get worse because we are solving the wrong problems. I mean, I would have that 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. And I know if there are humans a thousand years from now, I guess we solved at least some of the problems facing us. But I think it's still a good advice that before you rush to solve a problem, make sure that you are working on the right problem. I like that. If there are humans a thousand years from now, it's scary.

1:15:58I mean, maybe we'll be in zoos, who knows? Maybe we already are. But thank you so much. I'm glad we finally were able to make one happen in person. Definitely have to do it again. I always make seven or eight pages of notes and I go, I hope that's enough. And then on page three, it's like, hey, I gotta go, man. So that's always a sign of a good conversation. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. Imagine facing a rare incurable disease and finding out that AI could repurpose an FDA-approved drug as a potential cure. That's the breakthrough achieved by Dr. David Fegenbaum and the mission of his company.

1:16:30I'll never forget, the doctor walks in the room and says, David, your liver, your kidneys, your bone marrow, your heart, and your lungs are all shutting down. That's it. Like, we've tried everything. There's nothing more that we can do. I was terrified. I was like, had my last rites read to me, of course, you know, no one thought that it was even possible that I could survive. You're dying from this horrible disease. Chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window, but it's probably going to come back. So, you know, what's your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you? Well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have within reach.

1:17:04I'm like, shit, I've got this horrible disease. And the only way that like I might be able to save myself is if I can find a drug that's already at the CVS. And so my mission then became, could I figure out what the hell's going wrong in my immune system? So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. I'm not supposed to be here. Like, my drug wasn't made for me. It saved my life. It was always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CBS, your nearby Walgreens, that could help more diseases and more people, but the incentives aren't aligned for us to do that.

1:17:41So we created Every Cure a couple years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease it possibly can, regardless of whether it's profitable or not. 80 % of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow, no one's doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them. Tune into episode 1005 of the Jordan Harbinger Show to explore how existing medications are bringing new hope to those confronting elusive illnesses. All things Yuval. Do I have to say all three names? I'm just going to say Yuval. We'll be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:18:19Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter is a great companion to the show. It's called Wee Bit Wiser. It drops every Wednesday. The idea is to give you something specific, practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. Again, it's like a two-minute read. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out over at jordanharbinger.com slash news. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

1:18:47and this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's into these kind of heady topics, populism, authoritarianism, AI, or maybe they're just a big Yuval Noah Harari fan, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:19:17And we'll see you next time.