Why the world isn't fair: Yuval Noah Harari on AI, Ukraine, and Gaza

Transcript

Listen: In the latest episode of the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits with bestselling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari to delve into the transformative power of storytelling, the existential challenges posed by AI, the critical geopolitical stakes of the Ukraine conflict, and the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, while also exploring personal and societal strategies for navigating an era of unprecedented change and advocating for mindfulness and ethical awareness.

Harari highlights humanity's unique ability to forge societies through shared stories, which, while unifying, can also seed conflict. This is a special, extended version of their interview, taped live at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and exclusive to podcast listeners.

Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

TRANSCRIPT: Why the world isn't fair: Yuval Noah Harari on AI, Ukraine, and Gaza

Yuval Noah Harari:

If Russia is allowed to win, that's the end of the global order as we have known it for decades. The most fundamental rule was that you cannot just invade and conquer and annex another country, neighboring country, just because you're stronger. This was the case for centuries, for thousands of years, and this is exactly what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of the conversations that I have each week on my public television show. Today, why isn't the world fair? It's a big question, so it's going to take a big brain to tackle it. Author and historian, Yuval Noah Harari, exploded onto the global stage back in 2014, a decade ago, with the publication of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

It hit the top of bestseller charts and stayed there, as academics and everyday readers alike debated his theories on the evolution of humans and how we came to rule the world. Harari describes a superpower that only humans possess: an ability to collaborate flexibly in large groups. It's what led to the formation of societies, laws, and governments, but also inequality, and slavery, and war.

Well, now, he's published a series for children that tries to explain some of those big concepts without scaring them unnecessarily. Why humans are so powerful, but also why we don't use that power solely for good. I spoke with him before a live audience in New York City at the famous 92nd Street Y. Let's get to it.

Speaker 3:

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Ian Bremmer:

Thank you, and welcome.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

It's your first time giving a public audience in the US in a couple years now.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah, since for two years, I think, since '22.

Ian Bremmer:

The world has changed a bit since then.

Yuval Noah Harari:

A bit. Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

We'll get to that. We'll start with your book, Unstoppable Us. I read it yesterday. It's a children's book. It still took me a couple hours. The thing that I took away most directly, when you're writing for kids about why life isn't fair is you're saying it's basically, it's all about stories.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Explain what you mean by that.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Much of is about stories. Yeah. Since I was a kid, I was extremely concerned, especially about the issue of war. I live in Israel, I live in the Middle East. There is constantly war. You want to know why there are so many wars in the world. Many people tell you that people fight, humans fight for the same reasons that other animals fight. It's just natural. You fight over territory, you fight over food the same way that chimpanzees, and wolves, and lions fight.

It took me many years of researching history to understand this is just not true. Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. If I look at the present terrible conflict tearing apart my region of the world, it's not really about territory, not objectively. There is enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build houses, and schools, and hospitals for everybody. There is no objective shortage of land.

Similarly, there is no objective shortage of food. There is enough food to feed everybody, and this is true of other conflicts in the world. You look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia doesn't lack territory. The last thing they need is more land. Why do they fight? People fight over the stories in their mind. I work in Jerusalem in the Hebrew University, and it's one of the most fought over places in human history.

It's hard to understand why. It's not such a great place. It's a very ordinary place. You walk around, it's just you have stones, and trees, and cats, and pigeons, and people, just like any other place.

Ian Bremmer:

It's on the water. The land is pretty good.

Yuval Noah Harari:

The land is not good. You can grow olives or something. There are no oil fields, there are no gold mines, nothing. In their imagination, people think, "Oh, this is not a stone. This is a holy stone. This is not just any place. It's full of angels, and gods, and saints, and prophets," and they fight over this. My husband just went two days ago here to the Apple Store and bought these new Apple Glasses.

Ian Bremmer:

You let him do that? Seriously? It's the beginning of the end of your relationship, obviously.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Well, that's one prediction that we'll see what will happen with it. People invented it thousands of years ago, this technology. They just call it a different name. It's the Holy Book. You walk around Jerusalem with this Holy Book, and you see, it's full of the augmented reality, of angels, and gods, and this is what people fight over. I just read a couple of weeks ago a book that Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian philosopher, wrote a couple of years ago.

He said that in context of the fight over Temple Mount, and the Dome of the Rock, and the Holy Rock on the Dome of the Rock under the Dome of the Rock, and he wrote that Jews and Muslims armed with nuclear weapons are about to commit one of the worst massacres of human beings ever over a rock. Over a rock. It's absolutely true. I listened to our Prime Minister Netanyahu, and he says, "This is the [foreign language 00:06:45], the rock of our existence."

Of course, the rock is just a rock, but the stories that we tell about it make it so important that people are willing to be killed, to kill and be killed, in millions, over that.

Ian Bremmer:

Structurally, what upsets you more, nationalism or religion?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I think first of all, we need both. In order to construct large-scale human societies, you must have these stories. They're not necessarily bad. Stories are tools. It's like a knife that you can use the knife to murder somebody, or to save their life in surgery, or to cut salad for dinner.

Ian Bremmer:

They create order in large societies.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah. Without religion, without nationalism, we can talk later, for instance, about the link between nationalism and democracy. I think that there are exceptions, but in most cases, nationalism is a precondition for democracy. If you don't have a strong national community, you cannot have a functioning democratic system. Every state is made up of many different tribes.

If you don't have strong, patriotic national feelings that unite the tribes, you cannot have a democracy. Every tribe will just fight for its own interests without caring at all. You can have a democracy, a dictatorship under such conditions, but not a democracy. Again, like with every story-

Ian Bremmer:

Is religion a precondition for anything on the positive side?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I don't think it's a precondition, let's say, for democracy, but it has done throughout history a lot of good, as well as a lot of bad things. The question is what do we do with these stories? With nationalism, the good side of nationalism is when it's about love, that the essence of nationalism should be a feeling of love, of special care about the group of people that makes me, for instance, pay my taxes honestly, so that people that I never met in my life will get healthcare. This is the bright side of nationalism.

The dark side is when it turns from love to hate. When people think that to be a patriot means to hate foreigners, or minorities, or whatever. It's the same with religion. Religion doesn't come down from heaven. It's created by humans. You look at the history of every religion, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism. People can make terrible things out of it, and they can make good things out of it. It's in our hands.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, reading the beginning of the book, you talk early stage about how these stories began. The stories began because as you move from hunters and gatherers to fixed agriculture that requires a level of order, you need stories.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Those stories can be unfair.

Yuval Noah Harari:

They usually have an element of unfairness in them. The key thing is you need lots of people to agree on the same rules. If you live in a small hunter-gatherer band, like 50 people going around, you know everybody else personally. If there is some disagreement, everybody can come together and discuss it.

If you now try to build a big city or a kingdom, let's say with a million people, you don't know 99% of the people in your kingdom. You can't talk with them directly, so how do you agree on common rules? Now, democracy was, if you think, okay, let's have a democratic debate about it, you could not have a democratic debate-

Ian Bremmer:

With all these people.

Yuval Noah Harari:

... On a large scale anywhere in the world until about the 18th century, because you don't have the technology. Democracy is built on top of information technology, which is why every change in information technology necessarily shakes democracy.

Before the late modern age, there is just no technical means to conduct a large-scale conversation on the level of entire country, which is why the only examples we have of a democracy before the late modern era are from tribes and city-states like ancient Athens. You don't have a single example of a large-scale democracy before the modern age.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, when I was reading about your looking and comparing these two systems, I have to say, you come across as almost nostalgic for why couldn't we all just stick around and be hunters and gatherers for a longer period of time?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

That's true?

Yuval Noah Harari:

In a way, I think we all have this in ourselves. If you're a kid stuck in school and you think, "Oh, I would rather go out and climb a tree," it's part of your mind remembers how it was for millions of years. Humans have been around for 2 million years. For most of that time, like 99% of that time, we were hunter-gatherers living in the savanna, in the forests. The type of life we came to live from the agriculture revolution onwards, it's really alien to us in so many different ways, from what we do for a living to what we eat.

Lots of people wonder, for instance, why do I have this tendency to eat things that are bad for me? What's wrong with my body that it wants to eat things that are bad for it? This is just a historical mismatch. Basically, our bodies still think that we are in the African savanna. If they encounter something sweet like a chocolate cake, they think, "Oh, we found a tree full of ripened fruit. We better eat as many of them as quickly as possible before the baboons come and finish it."

Your body's acting perfectly rational for the African savanna, but of course, not for life in the modern era. Again, on the conscious level, we know that, but on the deep level of our minds and bodies, we don't.

Ian Bremmer:

Is it because not enough time has passed? The wolves that are circling, they get domesticated in relatively short order. They learn how to interact in this new environment, but human beings haven't done that yet.

Yuval Noah Harari:

It takes a long time. Even dogs are still, to a large extent, wolves. It's interesting that they really domesticated themselves. We think that we domesticated them, and this is the case with most animals, cows, and sheep, and horses, and so forth, but not the dogs. They were the first. There is an entire section in the children's book, childrens love dogs. They also love dogs. The history of dogs is very important.

It's very interesting that they, apparently, it was wild wolves that started following the human bands, realizing, hey, these apes, they know something. They can bring down a mammoth and they can't eat the whole of it. If we just follow them and wait, when they go away, we can have for free lunch. To do that, you need to start understanding these apes. The wolves became very good at understanding human beings, and they are still probably the animal that understands us best.

They're not the smartest animal, like pigs are smarter than dogs, but not when it comes to understanding human emotions. It's the key for survival over 20, 25,000 years, since the beginning of this process of domestication. For the wolf that became a dog, the key is to understand these humans.

Ian Bremmer:

I got that from the book. Definitely, any child that reads this book will understand that dogs are something that we should treasure, we should engage with. You don't feel that way about cats. That also resonates with me. I thought that was very important.

I do remember the two skeletons, and the two skeletons as they're talking to each other, and one of the skeletons had a pretty good life and looked healthy for a skeleton. The other has all of these problems. It's hunched over, it's missing teeth, and that's the one that advanced into agricultural society.

Yuval Noah Harari:

That's the farmer.

Ian Bremmer:

If I'm a kid, I'm thinking, wow, society just did horrible things to people. Is that what you want me to take away as a child?

Yuval Noah Harari:

One of the main takeaways is there are unintended consequences to our decisions. It sounded like a good idea to start farming, and it turned out to be a good idea for a few people in the ancient world, like the kings and the pharaohs, that didn't have to do all the hard work and got all the benefits, but for most people, life as farmers was much harder. Instead of going to the wood to find fruits, and chase animals, and things like that, you have this monotonous backbreaking, literally backbreaking job, digging ditches, and then harvesting wheat, and grinding corn.

You don't get a good diet in exchange. You get a much worse diet. The diet of hunter-gatherers was extremely varied. You gather and hunt dozens of different species of animals and plants, so you get a very balanced diet. Farmers, especially ancient farmers, if you live in the Middle East, you eat wheat and wheat and wheat. If you live in India or China, you just eat rice. It's not a good diet. On top of that, you also get a lot of epidemics. Epidemics were not always there.

They were also an unintended product of the agricultural revolution. People thought they were creating paradise for humans. They actually created paradise for germs. Like in a hunter-gatherer band, if somebody gets diarrhea, maybe they infect one or two people. The next day, the band moves away.

Ian Bremmer:

Everybody gets it if you're stuck in one little fixed place.

Yuval Noah Harari:

If you're stuck in a fixed village or town, thousands of people crammed together with their goats, and sheep, and duck, and their sewage, and their garbage, this is paradise for germs. This is when you start seeing epidemics, and also large-scale warfare. Again, people think that wars are part of human nature. We actually don't have any archeological evidence for large-scale warfare between groups before about 13,000 years ago.

A lot of theories about what happened before, but hard evidence, skeletons with broken heads and arrows stuck in their bones, first time we have it, 13,000 years ago on the eve of the Agriculture Revolution in the Nile Valley. It seems that agriculture, if it didn't create war, it certainly gave it a huge boost. There is much more to fight over.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, if I want to look, take this into the future, understand that for much of our history, the lives of the average human being, deeply problematic. The last 50 years, it's been kind of extraordinary, right?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah. Best time ever.

Ian Bremmer:

Best time ever. Globalization, we like it. What made the change, and should we be just truly optimistic when we talk to young people today about what we've been able to accomplish more recently?

Yuval Noah Harari:

First of all, I should be clear that it was better than any previous time, it still wasn't good. Lots of wars, lots of problems, but still better than any previous time we know about. This distinction should be clear. There are lots of statistics to illustrate it. One, I think, of the most important statistics is government expenditure, that when people talk about the early 21st century being the most peaceful era in human history, at least since we have records.

For most of history, the average expenditure on the military from the Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire to the British Empire, at least 50% of the government budget goes to the military: soldiers, forts, warships. In the early 21st century, it was down to about 7% of the government budget worldwide goes to the military, whereas 10% goes to healthcare. First time in history that we know of that governments all over the world spent more time on healthcare than on the military.

Now, this was not the result of some divine miracle or a change in the laws of nature. It was humans making good decisions, building good institutions, formulating and believing in hopeful and beneficial stories, ideologies. The bad news is that because it wasn't a change in the laws of nature or a divine miracle, it was just humans making good choices, over the last 10 years or so, people started making some very, very bad choices.

I think that the good times are over, and we are now seeing a resurgence of wars all over the world. Military budgets are skyrocketing. The money shifts back from nurses and hospitals, and then teachers and schools. It shifts back now to missiles, and tanks, and cyber weapons.

Ian Bremmer:

Despite all of the explosion of cross-border trade and capital, despite all of the education for young people, for women around the world, despite the massive expansion of the middle class on a global basis, not just rich people, you actually think looking at the world right now, 2024, nope. The coming years are going to be much more problematic?

Yuval Noah Harari:

It's not deterministic.

Ian Bremmer:

I understand. That's your-

Yuval Noah Harari:

Looking at the trends in recent years, we are going towards a very dark place.

Ian Bremmer:

If you're a parent trying to explain all of this to your children, and it was very clear as I was reading the book that this was the book that you wanted, that you wish you had for yourself.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

It was very, comes through, and it's lovely in that way. How would you talk to parents in the audience today to say, "Here is how I think you should try to address the fact that we are living in such a fraught, a dangerous period?"

Yuval Noah Harari:

First, I would say that we can't protect the kids from the actual violence and from the actual bad consequences, so we shouldn't try to protect them from the information about it, that we should talk openly about what is happening in the world. Of course, not in a kind of doomsday scenario, "That's it. It's all over." The key message is that humans created the world in which we live, so humans can change it. Yes, the trends now are in a negative direction, but this is just a result of human decisions.

We have the resources to deal with all the major problems of the world, whether it's climate change, whether it's the rise of AI, whether it's the rise of resurgence of wars, we can deal with it. If you think about, for instance, climate change and the ecological crisis, which worries a lot of young people, the most important thing to say about it, I think, is that again, going back to government budgets, if you need to place the kind of price tag on it, how much would it cost humanity to prevent catastrophic climate change?

The best estimates I could find is less than 5% of the global budget. If you think in terms of the budget of humanity, global GDP, less than 5% protects us. If we invest it in the right places, protects us from catastrophic climate change. Now, it's a huge amount of money, but it's still, in terms of budget, it's less than 5%. We can do. That doesn't mean that we will do it. It's a question of motivation.

Like with wars, going back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what I said in the beginning, that it's about stories, it's not an insolvable conflict. It's not like in mathematics, that there are certain mathematical problems which have no solution. Mathematicians can actually prove to you, "This problem has no solution." It's never like that in politics. Every problem has a solution, often many more than just one solution. It's a question of motivation. Do people have the motivation to solve it?

Ian Bremmer:

You want young people to question the stories when the stories are unfair.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

When you talk about Malala and the fact that she just wanted girls to go to school, she thought it was unfair that girls weren't able to go to school, and so she was shot for that, but now received a Nobel Prize for that, and is making a difference all over the world for that.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah, I think that the Feminist Revolution more generally is one of the most hopeful examples we have in history. The injustice involved in gender relations has been one of the most widespread injustices in human history. In almost every society for thousands of years, it was very easy to reach the conclusion that this is just a natural and eternal part of human societies. It could never be changed, and if perhaps it can be changed, it will require enormous amount of violence.

You have a lot of people who have this thinking that deep structural injustices can only be solved with violence. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. The Feminist Revolution showed that this is just not true. It was one of the most successful and the quickest revolutions in the long-term history of humanity, accomplished with remarkable little violence, at least on the side of the revolutionaries.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, yeah.

Yuval Noah Harari:

They didn't start any wars, didn't assassinate any political rivals, and still changed the world for the better, extremely rapidly.

Ian Bremmer:

You came across as incredibly hopeful on that, and I was glad that that was a way that you closed the book for young people. The thing that you came across as most negative on, and it was through the book, was how badly we treat animals all the way through. Whether you're talking about milk, and the fact that sheep and cows don't have access to their children, they have to just keep birthing, or whether it's the way we treat animals for meat, all of that. Why...

Three people care about that in the audience. It's good. Why has that been something, because also it's a question of resources, why have we been so much more hopeful on feminism recently? Why do so few people actually talk about the issue of how treat all of these other beings that live with us on the planet?

Yuval Noah Harari:

It goes back in the end to stories. We don't think about ourselves as animals. We think that there are animals, and then there are us, and we are something completely different.

Ian Bremmer:

We thought about women that way. We thought about slaves that way. We thought about a lot of beings that way for a long time. We don't anymore.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yes, and again, even extremely powerful and deep-rooted stories can be changed quite quickly. Again, this is part of the hopeful message of the book, and again, trying to think in broad terms, how do people understand history? At least in the last century or so, you can say there are really just three big stories that people have told about history. You have the fascist story, which tells people history is a conflict between nations.

This is the fundamental structure or dynamic of history is a conflict between nations or between races, which is inevitable, and which can only end with the complete victory of one nation or one race over all the others. Then the second story is the Marxist or the communist story, which also says history is a conflict, but not between nations. It's a conflict between classes. Again, it's an inevitable conflict that can only end with the complete victory of one class over the others.

From these two perspectives, everything we talked about, about all these stories, about women, about animals, about religion, this is just a smokescreen. This is just confusing people. Look through the smoke, you will see the deep mechanisms of nation against nation, of class against class. These are deeply pessimistic stories, because they say that conflict is inevitable, and that injustices and relations between nations or between classes can only be fixed with violence.

That the whole world is a power struggle, and the only thing that makes a difference is power. The third story is much more hopeful, and this is the liberal story. The main message of liberalism is that the world is not conflict. History is not about conflict. The deep truth about history is that humans of all nations and classes share certain experiences, based on which, we can find shared values and interests.

Not everything, of course, is shared, but the deepest level of who we are, all these nations and all these religions, they are just a few thousand years old. If you go really deep inside us, so people everywhere suffer from pain, from hunger. Everywhere, they love their parents, their children. Why then are there so many conflicts and injustices because of ignorance and of problematic stories that people believe?

If the stories are the problem, then yeah, sometimes violence is necessary, but ultimately, you can solve at least some problems and some injustices just by talking with people and changing the stories they believe.

Ian Bremmer:

We start with very small amounts of organization that don't require stories either for order or to motivate in negative ways. We then move through societies that become bigger. We have kingdoms, we now have nations. They require nationalism to get democracy.

As we look ahead, and not very long, just within a generation or two, we're now talking about issues, challenges that don't have borders. They're global. Climate change is one, artificial intelligence is another. The stories that you would have to tell-

Yuval Noah Harari:

Are global.

Ian Bremmer:

... Are global.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

There's no out group?

Yuval Noah Harari:

There shouldn't be. If there is an out group, we are in deep trouble. We can't solve climate change on the level of one nation. We can't regulate AI on the level of one nation. If we continue to think in terms of us versus them, we can win all the battles, we will lose the big war.

Ian Bremmer:

Structurally, does that make you more optimistic, since the nature of the organization that will be required to respond to these challenges are global, then the stories, by their nature, will need to involve people that are so otherwise different?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah. This is why I write, for instance, these books, to tell the story of humanity, and not the story of Israel or the story of the Jewish nation. There is place also for these kind of local and tribal stories, but because we face these kind of global problems, we also need to think more in terms of global stories. As I said before, ultimately, I think it's important to go down to the level of the body.

What divides people one against the other is the fantasies in our mind. When you look in our fantasies, we are so different from each other. When you look at the level of the body, we are extremely similar to each other. Again, I'm not advocating abandoning the mind, but having a better balance between mind and body with more emphasis on our embodied existence, that would be very good for us.

Ian Bremmer:

Let's now move to, we've been talking about things that are affecting us right now. Actually, no, one other question first, which is you are a historian, and you're not just bounded by your body and your mind. You're also bounded by this very specific context: the when.

You're writing these very, very big books, frankly, a couple of the most important books of the 21st century. Do you exist at exactly the right time or would we be much better off if you were a little in the past or a little in the future?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I have no idea. I think that everybody is the product of the exact moment.

Ian Bremmer:

Given what you're trying to explain to people, given where the world has been and where it is about to be, what's the most important time to be telling the kind of story that you want to tell?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I think now, and I think we don't have a lot of time. We haven't mentioned AI so far, but the horizon, we are at the edge of the cliff. We are very close to the point. Whether you think about the world in terms of power, or whether you think about the world in terms of stories, it's going to shift. The control of these is going to shift to AI. AI is the first technology in history that can take power away from us.

Every previous tool: stone knives, atom bombs, they empowered us because the decision about how to use them could only be made by a human being. An atom bomb cannot decide who to bomb. An autonomous weapon system can decide by itself who to bomb. A social media algorithm decides by itself what news to show you or what stories to show you. It is already taking power away from humans. For the first time in history, we are losing power as a species at a very rapid pace.

Similarly, we are also losing control of the stories that we believe. AI is the first technology in history that can create stories by itself. People compare it sometimes to the printing press, but it's a completely different thing. A printing press can only copy my ideas. I write something, and then it can create a thousand million copies. It cannot write a single line by itself, but AI can.

I think very soon, we will reach a point when the stories that dominate, if you're not careful, the stories that dominate the world, ideologically, politically, religiously, will be composed by a non-human intelligence.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that not inevitable?

Yuval Noah Harari:

As a historian, I tend not to believe in inevitability. Again, at the present moment, 2024, we still have control of the direction that AI is developing. I don't know for how many more years. If we don't do anything, then yes, I think that in, I don't know, 10 years, the stories that dominate the world will, for the first time in history, be the product of a non-human intelligence.

Ian Bremmer:

I assume this is happening actually faster than what you anticipated when you wrote Homo Deus.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah. When I wrote Sapiens in 2014, I hardly thought about AI at all. In 2014, just 10 years ago, AI was the domain of science fiction and of a very small community of experts. I wrote Homo Deus in 2016, and I got really interested in AI around that time. Still, I couldn't imagine that we will be where we are right now in 2024. I thought it would take us much, much longer to get to a situation with the capabilities that now, say, ChatGPT or GPT-4 have.

It's moving faster than I think almost anybody expected. Really, we haven't seen anything yet, thinking about it in terms of, say, kind of organic evolution. The AIs of today are basically like amoebas. They're just the first tiny creatures at the beginning of a new evolutionary process, but digital evolution is millions of times faster than organic evolution.

It took billions of years to get from the first microorganisms to dinosaurs, to T-Rex. To get from the AI amoebas to AI T-Rex could take maybe just 10 years. Now, if ChatGPT is the amoeba, just try to imagine what the AI T-Rex of 10 years from now would look like.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, in the history that you write about is full of incremental change, and it's also full of discontinuities, but there's no logarithmic change in the histories that you write.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

This is that.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Because we are shifting from an organic to an inorganic world. We are organic beings. Again, we constantly go back to the body. Even our mind, our imagination is ultimately the product of organic processes. We think on an organic time scale, and AI is not an organic entity. It plays by a completely different set of rules, both in terms of the time scale, of how fast it changes and develops, and the limits on what it can do.

If you take, for instance, the game of go, so people played go for 3000 years in a particular way, and entire traditions, and schools of thought, and wisdom of generations. Within a few years, first AlphaGo and then AlphaZero, just opened up completely new territories of how to play go that never occurred to any human for 3000 years. This is likely to happen more and more with [inaudible 00:38:40], and politics, and religion, and every field that AI will enter.

Ian Bremmer:

What's most vulnerable, given those changes? Is it the nature of our democracy? Is it the nature of our society? Is the nature of religion? Is it our economic systems? What do you think is most vulnerable? Not 20 years out, but one, two, three, five years out, where do you think we need the most focus for resilience, for example?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I'm not sure, but I would say that democracy and finance are two of the weakest links. Democracy, because democracy is a conversation, and AI has hacked our conversations. It has mastered language. It is now able to produce texts, and to deep fake voices, and to increasingly even create intimacy with us. It has no feelings of its own yet, but it is able to fake intimate relations. You meet someone online, you are no longer able to tell whether it's a human being or an AI.

Now, over the past 10 years, there was this big battle for human attention over social media. Now, the battle front is shifting from attention to intimacy. If you want to change people's minds about anything, intimacy is the key. AI is learning how to press our emotional buttons better than any human being. Under these conditions, the conversation could simply collapse.

Just think about the public sphere being flooded, not with a few hundred or a few thousand AIs, but they can be mass-produced, hundreds of millions of AIs being able to hold a conversation better than the average human being.

Ian Bremmer:

Infinite patience, engagement.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Infinite patience. No emotions of their own. They are never angry, they are never fearful, they are never bored. They are just 100% focused on you, on hacking your emotional system. The longer you interact with it, like you meet somebody online, and you have an argument about climate change, or the US elections, or whatever, it's a bot. Now, for you, it's a complete waste of time. You're not going to change the bot's opinion on anything. It's a bot.

Every minute you spend talking with this bot, it gets to know you better and better, to hone its arguments, to forge an intimate relationship with you. This is a social weapon of mass destruction, could potentially destroy trust between people, and destroy the ability to have a conversation.

Ian Bremmer:

That is already happening. We see that happening with social media today.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah. One of the kind of key questions to ask any tech executive or whatever is just, "Explain to me, how is it that you created the most sophisticated information technology in the history of the world, and people can no longer talk with each other?" Is it possible? Whatever you think about what's happening in the world, it's clear that the conversations are breaking down. The fact that it's happening at the same time that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history, it can't be a coincidence.

One possibility, we said earlier that democracy, large scale democracy, was simply impossible before the 18th century, because the technology was not there. It could be that we now have the technology is too sophisticated for the human brain, and that in the new technological era, again, democracy becomes impossible. What will replace it is not clear, because dictatorships are also in big, big trouble. We tend not to think about it, but dictators also have problems in life.

Ian Bremmer:

You were actually sympathetic to the challenges of creating order as a dictator in your book. Yeah, you were.

Yuval Noah Harari:

As a dictator, the biggest problem always is how to control your own subordinates. The one thing a dictator never wants to have is a subordinate more powerful that he doesn't know how to control. AI is exactly that in the toolkit of everything-

Ian Bremmer:

That's one of the reasons the Chinese are regulating AI so much more strict.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yeah, they're terrified.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely.

Yuval Noah Harari:

You think the most effective tool of every dictator in history is fear. How you're Stalin and you want to keep people in line, what do you do? You terrorize them. How do you terrorize an AI? What will you do? Send it to the Gulag, kill its family? What can you do to an AI that starts to say things or do things that go against the party line, or try to take power away from you? Dictators are in a very, very serious problem, in a way, even worse problem than democracies.

Ian Bremmer:

Speaking of the Gulag, we need to talk for a couple minutes about public events. Back when the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022, you were hopeful that this could end culture war between left and right in the west. It does not feel like that has happened.

Yuval Noah Harari:

No. Did not happen.

Ian Bremmer:

Also, you still believe that Russia-Ukraine is the most important geopolitical conflict out there. Talk for a couple minutes about where you think it is and where it's going.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Basically, if Russia is allowed to win, that's the end of the global order as we have known it for decades. The most fundamental rule was that you cannot just invade and conquer and annex another country, neighboring country, just because you're stronger. This was the case for centuries, for thousands of years.

It was not the case, if we talked earlier about state budgets, the reason the average expenditure on the military went down from 50% to 7%, and released all these resources to healthcare, education, and so forth, is because most people, most countries felt that they're safe. That even if they have a strong neighbor, it's just not done anymore. Maybe there'll be some kind of border clash or whatever, but the idea that the neighbors will just invade us, conquer us, and annex our country, it's just not done.

This is exactly what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine. It's completely different from, say, the American invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, which have huge, of course, problems there. There was no intention of making Iraq the 51st state of the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

They weren't going to take the oil, they weren't going to take the land. That wasn't going to happen.

Yuval Noah Harari:

People talk about imperialism, imperialism. They forgot what imperialism means. Originally, imperialism in the Roman sense, in the Ottoman sense, in the Mongol sense, is that you invade a neighboring country, and just conquer and annex it. It's not cultural imperialism. This is imperialism. People forgot because it wasn't done for quite some time, and this is exactly what Putin is trying to do.

If he gets away with it, we will see more and more Putins all over the world. I don't know, like Maduro in Venezuela, Ali in Guyana. If Russia can invade and conquer Ukraine, why can't Venezuela invade and conquer Guyana?

Ian Bremmer:

Do you want me to answer that? You can't get through the border, the Brits have sent the ships, Venezuela... There are many reasons you can't do that.

Yuval Noah Harari:

No, I'm saying it not as a kind of technical issue.

Ian Bremmer:

No, you mean philosophically?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Again, if...

Ian Bremmer:

Assume a can opener.

Yuval Noah Harari:

The question is, does anything defend, any country around the world, accept brute military force? If the answer is no, then we will see military budgets everywhere skyrocket, and more and more military alliances, and more and more wars, because we know the cycle. You want to make yourself safer. The neighbors feel more frightened. This is what we've been through for centuries.

There is a chance, actually, history is often, we only understand the meaning of historical events with hindsight. There is a scenario that we are already living in the midst of the third World War, and we just don't know it. If you think about the second world war, so today, any school kid knows that it started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. If you ask people, let's say, in May 1941, in people in New York, people in Stalingrad, people in Hiroshima-

Ian Bremmer:

Wasn't World War III. Wasn't World War III.

Yuval Noah Harari:

It's not World War III? Yes, there is a conflict in Europe. There are some conflicts in Asia, but it's not World War III. Only with hindsight, we say, "Oh, yeah, this is when it started." We could already be in the midst of World War III that started on the 24th of February 2022, and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we just don't know it yet.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, why hasn't it brought together? NATO is stronger today than it was in 2022, that's clear. It hasn't brought together left and right across the US and Europe. Why not?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on the political dynamics within the United States, within Europe. What you do see very worrying is a trend in many countries, in the US, also in my country, of the kind of suicide of conservative parties. For many generations, the Democratic game was the kind of double act of conservatives and progressives, like a car with the brakes and the fuel pedal. You press this, you press that, you change, going too fast, going too slow.

Suddenly, conservative parties all over the world are committing suicide and turning into radical revolutionary parties, that the basic idea of conservatism is to conserve, to conserve institutions, to conserve traditions. It's the progressive who say, "Let's move faster. Let's change things. Let's destroy institutions." The conservative says, "No, no, no, let's calm down. We don't understand the world very well." You think this institution should be destroyed, but actually, it's important.

Now, the ones who are trying to destroy institutions and traditions are the conservatives. It becomes the job of progressives to protect and conserve institutions and traditions. They're not good at it. This is not their job. They're the ones who are supposed to press forward all the time. I don't really know why it's happening. You think about, for instance, the 6th of January, and the mythological moment of the conservative philosophy is the storming of the Bastille.

When Burke says, "This is a bad idea, it will end badly," this is kind of the creation story of conservatism. On the 6th of January, you have all these conservatives cheering the storming of the Bastille. Again, the progressives are basically doing what they've been doing for decades. What I don't understand is this kind of self-immolation of conservative parties.

Again, in the US, you can try and explain it in all kinds of local dynamics, but because you see it in more and more places around the world...

Ian Bremmer:

If I wanted to take the MAGA position, which is in New York, so it's hard to do, but you have a lot of people that are saying, "Well, you supported globalization, and it hollowed out our working class, our middle class. You supported all of this automation, but what about the way we used to live? You allowed all this immigration, but who are we?" Many of them would argue that conservatism is trying to focus on the historic battles-

Yuval Noah Harari:

Why... Perfectly okay. Why the attack on institutions? Why the attack on the institution of the elections? Why the attack on all the civil servants as deep state? This is not conservative.

Ian Bremmer:

If you believe those institutions no longer reflect or support the people or the values that they have -

Yuval Noah Harari:

Then you become revolutionary, yes. Again, this is the narrative.

Ian Bremmer:

That's the narrative.

Yuval Noah Harari:

That's the narrative. We can argue it's true. It's not true. I'm just making an observation, this is a revolutionary narrative. It's a narrative saying, "All the institutions or most of the institutions of the country are dysfunctional. We need to destroy them and start from scratch." This is the French Revolution, this is the Bolshevik Revolution. This is not conservatism. You can say it's still true. We still need to do it.

The other thing I would say is about this narrative of globalization. Maybe it's true of the US, but what about Brazil? What about India? What about Poland? You have so many countries that benefited from globalization, and you still see analogous processes. I think globalization and the impact on the job market, it's an easy solution, but it doesn't cover what we see globally.

Ian Bremmer:

I have a few questions from you. I'm going to transition to that by asking the one question I haven't asked you at all, haven't talked about the Middle East.

Yuval Noah Harari:

The Middle East.

Ian Bremmer:

You live in Israel.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

You were active, you were out there demonstrating before the horrors of October 7th because of what the Prime Minister was trying to do as a conservative with Israeli institutions, like the Judiciaries.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Again, same thing. He was trying to systematically destroy the institutions of Israeli democracy. We had the same conspiracy theories about the deep state also in Israel. Actually, this is one of the key explanations for what happened on October 7th, that you had for months, the Army, the Secret Service, the Shin Bet warning Netanyahu, both privately and also publicly, "Israel is in a terrible danger, that you need to shift your attention from trying to destroy Israeli democracy to focus on the external threat of Hamas, of Hezbollah, of Iran. We are in extremely dangerous situation."

He just didn't listen. The reason he didn't listen, and the people around him didn't listen, they had a theory in their minds, also publicly they stated it, that all these military experts, the chief of the IDF, the chief of the Shin Bet, they're part of the deep state conspiracy against them. They don't really have information. They don't really believe that Israel is in danger. Israel is in no danger at all. They are just making these warnings in order to force me to stop the judicial overhaul, the attempt to, again, destroy the institutions of Israeli democracy.

This is how we got to October the 7th. On a deeper level, I would say that what is happening in Israel has been happening for not just in the recent year, but for years now, is a struggle for the soul of the country, and more than that, for the soul of Judaism. Between Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, and a new messianic mutation of Judaism that believes in Jewish supremacy, we talked about the difference between good nationalism and bad nationalism.

At its best, nationalism recognizes the uniqueness of our nation, and talks about our right to develop our traditions and so forth. At its worst, it's false victim to this supremacy complex, that we are not just unique, we are superior to everybody. We now have this movement of Jewish supremacy in Israel. It's part of the coalition, it's part of the government. They have a messianic vision for the country.

If you ask them, "What do you see in the future, five years, 10 years down the road?" They also talk in terms of from the river to the sea, of a single big Israel with Jews supreme, basically, a three caste system, with Jews supreme with full rights, some Arabs with some rights as second class citizens, and lots of other Arabs with no rights at all. This is their vision for the country.

Ian Bremmer:

You're talking about some of the far right that's in the coalition with Netanyahu.

Yuval Noah Harari:

That's in the coalition.

Ian Bremmer:

That's right.

Yuval Noah Harari:

They're in the coalition with Netanyahu. If this is the big fight, we are trying to stop them. If we fail, if they succeed in realizing this Messianic vision, this will change the very meaning of Judaism all over the world. People here will also have to deal with the consequences.

Ian Bremmer:

The question here, which is, do you think there is a way to use your stories, these stories, to alleviate the hatred and the violence that we have right now? I add to that, the supremacy issue also exists uncomfortably with the victimhood stories, and that both with the Palestinians and the Jews for so long, they've defined themselves in terms of the pain of victimhood. That doesn't create much space for other people's stories. How do you do that?

Yuval Noah Harari:

This is the work we need to do, individually and also collectively, to change the narrative, to change the story. Again, you see it all over the world that people everywhere tell their story as a story of victimhood. You have also some of the most powerful countries in the world, Russia, telling itself its story as a story of victimhood. Everybody's against us, everybody hates us. Everybody tries to destroy us.

The problem in stories of victimhood, they always have an element of truth in them, of course, but if you think about yourself primarily as a victim, it relieves you of our responsibility. I'm not responsible for all the problems in the world. I'm a victim. I need more power. One day, when I'm empowered, okay, then I take responsibility, but not now. Now, I just need to focus on getting more power for myself.

Ian Bremmer:

You're not responsible for any of the people that are killed in Gaza, not one.

Yuval Noah Harari:

That's the story of the victim. Part of also what I try to do in the children's book is to say, "No, humans are the most powerful entities on the planet." Also, when you look at human collectives, states, tribes, religions, all of them have some measure of power. Unless we kind of change our narratives from one of victimhood to one of at least partial empowerment, we are not going to take responsibility for anything.

Ian Bremmer:

Then how do you, another question from the audience, it's a great one, how do you define the difference between patriotism and nationalism? Specifically, where's the limit, before we have ideologies that endanger us?

Yuval Noah Harari:

It's the limit between uniqueness and supremeness and the limit of the border between love and hate. The good type of patriotism says that, "This is a unique group of people, which I love, I care about, and therefore, I'm willing to go the extra mile for them. I do for them things that I wouldn't do for others," which is completely reasonable. This is how we behave with our family, with our friends. This is also how we should behave with our nation.

It becomes dangerous when we start saying, "This group of people, they're not just unique. They're superior, they're supreme, they're better than anybody else. They deserve far more than anybody else." When the emphasis shifts from love and caring to hate, people who define themselves, "I'm a great patriot because I hate foreigners. I am a great patriot, not because I pay my taxes, I don't pay any taxes. It's because I hate minorities, so I'm a great patriot," and this is the danger zone.

Ian Bremmer:

Another question. In the months leading up to October 7th, you were highly critical of the Israeli government. We've talked about that. Since October 7th, you have defended Israel's right to exist, and have been critical of the progressive left that blames Israel and the occupation. How do you reconcile these complicated views?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Two ideas held at the same time, no problem. I'm in favor of Palestinians, realizing their rights to live a dignified life in their homeland. At the same time, I'm in favor of Israelis having their rights to live dignified lives in their homeland. What exactly the solution would look like, two states, this kind of solution, it's difficult to say the present moment, but at the end of the road, we need a situation when the right to exist, and not just to exist, but again, to live dignified lives, of both nations, is recognized.

There shouldn't be a logical contradiction. Just because you are in favor of the rights of Palestinians doesn't mean you have to be also in favor of destroying Israel completely. Just because you are in favor of defending Israel doesn't mean that you should ignore the terrible suffering of the Palestinians and their rights.

Ian Bremmer:

Two big things. Speaking of holding two views in your mind at the same time, since October 7th, two different things have happened, right? On the one hand, we have a lot more people that now see the urgency of creating a pathway for the Palestinians to be able to govern themselves and have a level of self-defense.

On the other hand, you have radicalized far larger numbers of populations, both inside Israel and in Gaza in the West Bank, among Palestinian refugees in Jordan, and elsewhere. Which of those two things do you feel is more likely to play out to determine outcomes, and why?

Yuval Noah Harari:

It depends on the decisions being taken right now, or in the coming weeks and months. There is a potential that out of this terrible catastrophe, something good will actually emerge. If there is a kind of comprehensive deal for a peace treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which also includes the restart of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, rebuilding of Gaza, and providing the Palestinian people with a better future.

If we go in that direction, I think that all the terrible hatred and fear that has been created in recent months, we can get over it. When you're in the midst of this moment of terrible pain, you think it will last forever, but time is very powerful.

Ian Bremmer:

Talk about Rwanda. Give the Rwanda example.

Yuval Noah Harari:

Exactly 30 years ago, we had this terrible genocide in Rwanda. You had October the 7th on 10 times bigger, not a thousand people massacred in a day, 10,000 people massacred in a day, in terrible way, not with bombs from far away, but with knives and clubs. Then it happened again the next day, and again the next day, and again the next day. For a hundred days, a million people were murdered in a hundred days, in the most atrocious ways you could imagine.

30 years later, they live together, the Hutu and Tutsis. Rwanda is one of the most successful, by many measures, countries in Africa. At the time in the early nineties, it would've been utterly unthinkable. It's only 30 years. Similarly, if you think about the history of Jews and Germans that are now very good friends, and it was just 70, 80, 80 years ago. In the midst of a very painful moment, the pain and the hatred, they just flood your mind completely.

It's like a black screen in front of your eyes. You can see nothing. You think it will last forever, but if people make the right decisions, even the worst storms pass.

Ian Bremmer:

The last question I have here is actually about you going off the grid, which I guess you do for a month every year?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I try to, yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

You also don't use a smartphone except for emergencies. You're vegan, right?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Vegan-ish.

Ian Bremmer:

Vegan-ish?

Yuval Noah Harari:

I try not to make it a religion.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, you do that, you try to make most things not a religion, I think is the way, we've had that discussion. You meditate for an hour in the morning, an hour after work. Are you doing this just to annoy us? I don't know about you guys, I am aligned with a lot of what he says, but the flesh is weak. Explain, if this isn't just to be better than us, what are you trying to accomplish?

Yuval Noah Harari:

People take such good care of their bodies, sometimes. They spend hours in the gym, in special diet and whatever. I also try to take good care of my mind, that our minds were shaped back in the Stone Age in a completely different situation, environment. We are now flooded by enormous amounts of information that we cannot deal with. On top of that, with our smartphones, and social media algorithms, and so forth, what the smartest people in the world have been doing in recent years is figuring out how to use these devices in order to hack our brains and press our emotional buttons.

Anybody who thinks they are strong enough to resist it is just fooling themselves. It's much, much more powerful than us. I'm not saying it's impossible to just completely disconnect from the world, but taking some time off to just detoxify the mind, and to have a kind of information diet, both in terms of the quantity of information, and also in terms of the quality of information that we consume. Some people are so aware what they put into their mouth and into the stomach, we should need to be also aware of what we put into our minds, and also what we take out.

My work, I write books, I give these kind of public talks, I'm a public intellectual, so I know that the things I say, they go into the minds of thousands, maybe potentially millions of people, and they are like seeds that go into all these minds. We have to be very, very careful about what seeds we are planting. I think this is even more important in the case of politicians. If I look at politics today, again, one of the worst things about politics today is that people confuse politics and therapy.

They want to be authentic. They value when you speak your mind. You shouldn't speak your mind as a politician. You should be very careful about what you say. As a meditator, I know that the mind is full of garbage. People are very much in favor of building walls this day. We need to build a wall between the mind and the mouth, and be very careful about what immigrants we allow to cross the wall between the mind and the mouth.

Again, not in therapy. I also go to therapy. If you go to therapy, say whatever you want. I also think that we need, part of preserving privacy is to preserve the right for stupidity. I think that especially politicians should have a right to be stupid in private, that when they are just meeting their friends, they should have the right to say stupid, and terrible things, and racist things, and antisemitic things, and homophobic things in private.

I know from, again, my job as a public speaker, that you need to be very, to have a good guard of your mouth, it demands a lot of mental effort. You can't maintain it throughout the day, day after day after day. I think that yes, we have to be very careful about what we say in public, and we also need, again, time off to be as stupid as we want.

Ian Bremmer:

What I really like about this answer is that I was worried that you were better than us, and in reality, it turns out you're a little worse, just deep down. Will you please join me in giving a hand to help making Yuval great again? Thank you.

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Why don't you check us out at GZEROMedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter, it's called GZERO Daily.

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