391 - Yuval Noah Harari: Are You Imagining The Future Correctly?

If you don't get to know yourself better, there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you. And not just one—Amazon is trying to hack you, and Google is trying to hack you, and Coca-Cola is trying to hack you, and the Russians and the American government and the Chinese. They are all trying to hack you right now.

We have three big problems ... And these are nuclear war and climate change and technological disruption. And each of them is enough to destroy human civilization by itself. And when you combine them, you get a really toxic mix.

I'm very careful about preserving my time ... Attention is maybe the most important resource at present, and many devices, like smartphones, are really designed to grab your attention, to take over your attention. So, that can be dangerous sometimes.

What really transformed us from a species of unimportant apes into the rulers of the planet was quite minor changes in our DNA, which resulted in the restructuring, also, on a relatively small scale, of the human brain. The brain did not get bigger; it just got connected (wired) in a slightly different way. And this was enough to turn this insignificant ape into the ruler of the planet.

If you examine all these large-scale human cooperations, what you find is that they are based on storytelling, fictional and imaginary entities. We can cooperate with millions of strangers because we all believe in the same fictional stories about god, about nations, about money, about corporations, all kinds of things that exist only in the imagination.

We are far more united than ever before... but we are not united enough. In order to deal with any of these three big problems—nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption—we need very significant global cooperation. Because it should be absolutely clear: None of these problems can be solved on the national level by a single government.

The most important thing to know about life in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals.

The basic fact is that we control the planet because we are the only mammal that can cooperate on a very large scale. No other mammal can cooperate flexibly on the scale of thousands and millions.

At least some technologies could remain very expensive, very kind of lucrative, and will create an unprecedented gap between the rich and the poor. Because, for the first time in history, you will be able to really translate economic inequality into biological inequality.

I start reading a lot of books all the time. I drop, like, 90-something percent of them after 10 pages.

What you try to do a thousand years ago with the priest preaching from the pulpit you will be able to do in a far more invasive way in 10 or 15 years with all kinds of brain-computer interfaces and direct biological interventions.

We are already in the midst of an AI arms race, and this is a terrible situation because it almost guarantees that all our worst nightmares about AI will be realized.

If you lose your job as a truck driver in 2030 to a self-driving vehicle and there is a new opening in designing software, it's going to be a lot more difficult to retrain yourself as a software designer than it was to retrain yourself as a factory worker.

If you have to choose, even today, between going to the forest to look for mushrooms or carrying water buckets from the river all day or working as a cashier in a supermarket all day, I think that going to the forest to look for mushrooms is far more interesting.

From the perspective of the algorithm, well, this is just another biochemical process. If the computer can diagnose cancer, it can diagnose love. It's just a different biochemistry.