Will AI Kill Democracy? | Yuval Noah Harari

welcome to bankless where today we explore the future of uh Humanity M I think that's what it was yeah that's always been what youve all talks about actually uh this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here in person with my co-host David Hoffman and we are here to help you become more Bank list guys we have yval Noah Harari on the podcast today and this was a special episode for us because yal was like one of the founding his book sapiens was probably one of the founding documents let's say for the bankless podcast yeah that's right I think uh there is's a lot of just uvall

influence across all bankless content I would say 100% and uh you like for my own part his his ideas around money being a story being inter subjective reality kind of got me into crypto in the in the first place he's got a new book called Nexus that just came out his third book his third book and uh so we read that and prep for this meeting it's all about information networks and how that is like a superset of the story in the document and ledgers stories scaled I would say stories scaled with technology is how I would Define it

stories scaled with with technology and I think of course you know we think cryptocurrency property rights systems like uh ethereum and also Bitcoin other crypto assets are one of the most interesting stories some of the greatest stories ever told yeah a new inter subjective reality so we got to that at the end but we really started with his kind of thesis on information networks and what those actually are the lens of them he's got an idea of how they could go right and how they can go poorly in a couple different directions so we talk about all of that what what kind of

stuck out for you in this episode I think the biggest thing is that there's this idea that I think most people share and I think probably ideas that we've shared on the bankless podcast that uh technologies that help scale information are good fundamentally good and we we've talked about this uh most frequently with the printing press uh the printing press allowed for data to proliferate for information to proliferate and then this created better outcomes good outcomes uh and I think I mean I think I I still believe that but you've all

wants to come in and say he's got a but doesn't yeah but first they make very bad outcomes uh and he's also advocating that as we go into like what is perhaps the next version of the printing press we have the internet now but now we have this AI thing which is going to be a very novel challenging type of Information Network that first we're going to have to go through the butt phase before we come out through a good phase and that's a Nuance that I don't think that we've shared very much on the bankless podcast before no we haven't we also haven't done an inperson deep

anytime so uh that's of course the episode that David and I record after the episode I'm really excited to talk to you about on the couch bu content so if you are a bankless uh citizen you've got the bankless premium feed that's available for you and you can go catch that episode now so I guess without further Ado this is yal Noah Harari but before we get to that we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible including our recommended exchange to go get your inter subjective reality to start your crypto story which

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wallet to begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth seamless synergies with the uniswap web app so go and download the Unis swap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes just another way Unis swap is helping you swap smarter bankless Nation we are very excited to do an in-person conversation with yval Noah Harari he is a writer he is a philosopher he is a historian he's got a new book called Nexus and I think you've all I got to start I was telling you this off air but I got to start by actually thanking you because you've

written one of uh probably the top 10 books for me and it was actually my entry point into this podcast into meeting David into actually starting my cryptocurrency uh Journey it was it was sapiens and that book really transformed um the idea of money to me this idea of creating intersubjective realities uh the the power of myth and storytelling and just the mental model of human beings as like these storytelling Apes was incredibly powerful for me just like in general so

uh I want to start by just thanking you and then also welcoming you to bangas thank you it's good to be here so let's talk about your newest book it's uh expands on your last two I would say it's it's called Nexus and I want to start with a question you kind of begin the book with and you also conclude it with which is if human beings are so wise why are they also so self-destructive H so I think this is one of the key questions of history and also now of politics uh We've named our species Homo

sapiens the wise human and we are obviously the smartest animal on the planet uh we've reached the moon we split the atom we can read DNA and at the same time we are now on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system and we have an entire menu of ways how to do it whether ecological collapse or nuclear war or the rise of artificial intelligence that could endanger us and you know in many mythologies and theologies the answer to

the question why are humans s so self-destructive is that there is something wrong in our nature which is why we have to rely on some God or some Messiah outside ourselves to save us for ourselves and I I don't agree with this answer the answer that uh I present in Nexus is that the problem is not in our nature the problem is in our information most humans are wise and

good but if you give good people bad information they make bad decisions they make self-destructive decisions and what we have seen through through history is that the quality of our information doesn't improve over time uh because information isn't truth and isn't knowledge and isn't wisdom and you know the truth is a very rare and costly kind of information and we've been flooding ourselves for

thousands of years with mostly junk information and fictions and Fantasies and delusions and this is why even very sophisticated modern societies if you think about the Soviet Union you think about Nazi Germany they were still as susceptible to fall victim to mass delusion as any stone AG tribe so let's let's talk about seeing the world because I think your your book really sees the world through this specific lens which is the lens of uh information

networks specifically and so your entire thesis for this book is it's not nature it's networks that are the problem in particular information networks I think when people first come across that phrase information networks they might think of something like you mean it in a much broader way because they they might think of like their their corporate it policy or like Network diagrams or something like a religion is also Information Network held together by information by holy books like the Bible or the Quran by mythological stories by

commentaries on on on the holy book by images this is what if you think about what are some of the most successful information networks in history so Christianity and maybe most specifically the Catholic Church comes to mind it's probably the biggest and oldest institution in the world it's been going for close to 2,000 years you have more than one billion members all over the world um and what holds it together it's

um information and again it's comes in various forms not only the Bible but also Church law and dogma and images and church music uh these are all types of of information and interestingly enough again most of this information uh is not the truth if you think for instance about you know the most famous face in history the most the most common portrait in history is the face of Jesus over the last 2,000 years humans have

produced billions and billions of portraits of Jesus um they are everywhere in churches Cathedral houses and not a single one of them is an authentic likeness yeah there's no way he like that because there no portrait from his own lifetime has survived if anybody even bothered to to make a painting of him at the time and the Bible doesn't say a single word word about how he looked like not a single

word in the Bible was it tall or short fat or thin blonde or blackhaired or bald nothing absolutely nothing all these images of Jesus they are the product of our imagination they're all fictional and nevertheless they have been extremely effective in connecting together billions of people all over the world over centuries enabling both good things like building hospitals and Charities and so forth and also bad

things like Crusades and inquisitions and and whatever um and this is an Information Network mhm Let's uh unpack a little bit the difference between truth and information uh do you see truth as a subset of information and information is much grander unpack that that difference for us how is there information out there that exists and then how is that separate from what is true well I mean there is there is enormous amount of information in human

Societies in nature the truth is a very very small subset of that information most information in the world doesn't even attempt to to to tell the truth MH I mean the truth is something that points at reality something that tries to to point at an aspect of of reality um and most information doesn't attempt to do it the the function of most information is not to tell us the truth but to connect different

individuals into a network information is connection think for instance about a paradigmatic case is music about music there is not even a it's not even reasonable to ask is it true or not there is no such thing as true music and there is no such thing as fake music there has been a lot of bad music throughout history definitely but there is no fake music you know it's all this talk about fake news what is fake music it it doesn't mean anything what

music does is connecting lots of people together you go to church and you have these church music and change church hmes and you sing along with all the other congregation it connects you together you're a soldier on a military parade and you have these drums and these the trumpets and you MCH together it forms it takes a lot of individuals and Military music helps turn a lot of single individuals into a cohesive military unit you think about clubbers going to a club or to a

the music connects them but there is simply no it's it's illogical to ask but is it true or not M the the music right now there are some kinds of information that claim to tell us something about reality they are not trying to construct a new reality like a military unit they're trying to tell us something about reality like there is a piece of military intelligence that tells us there are now 1,000 Russian soldiers and attacking a position in Ukraine this is

an attempt to to point a finger at reality and it could be true or false maybe there are a thousand Russian soldiers there maybe there are just 500 maybe there are 10,000 so here the question of Truth arises and most of this kind of information is not true most of this kind of information they try to point at reality is lies and fiction and delusions and Illusions why

because the truth is costly MH whereas fiction is very cheap if you want to produce a truthful report about a military action in Ukraine or about what happened in the Roman Empire in the time of of of Jesus Christ or about the economic situation of a corporation you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money it it's costly if you if if you just write the first things that comes to your mind you just write

fiction that's very easy you don't need to do any research and in addition to that even if you went to the trouble and did all the research and produce this costly and rare type of information a truthful account uh it has two main big disadvantages in the market of information compared to fiction first the truth turns to to be complicated because reality is complicated that's part of the cost you pay it's

complication it's complication it's very comp to understand a pandemic to understand a war it's so complicated and people most of the time they we don't like complicated story we like simple stories now the truth has to be complicated because most of the time reality is fiction can be as simple as you would like it to be so this is again one very big advantage of fiction simple the other thing is the truth tends to be not always but sometimes

painful whether it's the truth about myself individually like this is why we go to therapy to realize how we hurt the loved ones in in our life how we hurt ourselves it's not not it's not something nice often to to learn about ourselves it could be the I don't know the CEO of a corporation who learns truthful but painful things about his or her corporations and policies that they made mistakes that they are failing whatever all the way to the level of a

nation that you know in election campaign um a politician who would tell people the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the history of of our nation is unlikely to win many votes that way because every nation whether Israel or the United States or Russia or India there's a lot of you know skeletons in in sometimes entire cemeteries in the closet that people are feel don't like to acknowledge so again the truth is costly it's complicated and

it's often painful whereas fiction is cheap it's uh uh simple can be made simple and can be made as attractive as you would like it to be so in a completely kind of free market of information if you flood the world with information uh the truth will not flow to the surface reminded of brand Do's law in Internet Internet culture where the [ __ ] asymmetry principle it's easier to produce [ __ ] and it is to produce truth that's a much

more Bren law yeah to explain what they took like 10 10 minutes no you said it like I love that the stories are help it's absolutely true the idea that there is an economic uh cost like almost like a proof of work a proof of Truth to truth certainly Rings true okay so we've got uh the idea of information we're separating that from truth truth is a particularly expensive form of information but it's also a valuable form of information let's let's scale back out let's talk about information

networks uh like once again why do humans create these information networks what does it help us do is there some sort of scale we can achieve with these things like why have we created them in the first place they are much more powerful you know a a a country with a million people in it cooperating can do many many things that a small tribe with just 200 members cannot you know if you go back to ancient times so if you live in a small

tribe with just a couple of hundred people and there is drought so your small territory is hit by drought there is nothing to eat you die of hunger MH but if you are a member of a much larger network of a million people spread like I don't know ancient Egypt or whatever spread over thousands of kilometers so if drought hits one part of the country you can rely on other parts of the country to provide you with food and similarly if if there

is a war and you are attacked by the neighboring tribe if it's just 500 people in your tribe that need to defend themselves obviously it's much more difficult than if you can call on the national Army that is recruited from a population of a million people it's the same with ideas if each tribe is for just just for itself then you know 500 people every now and then somebody comes up with a new idea which benefits the other 499 persons in the tribe but if

you have a million people in a network there are many more ideas new ideas of uh whether new medicines or new weapons that somebody thought about and you can share this with all the other members of the information Network this is the big advantage of our species if you think about our our kind of humans Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago the world was home to at least five other human species the most famous are the neandertals but there are others um and

Homo sapiens did not have bigger brains the neand Apparently had even bigger brains than us and on the individual level there is no indication that our species H was Superior to neandertal even today if you compare us to chimpanzees yes there are some things I can do in chimp and and vice versa there are many many things that a chimpanzee can do and I can't and if it would be like a a fair fight you put us both on a Lonely Island and we have to struggle for survival I would definitely put my

bets on the chimpanzees you know chimpanzees is 10 times stronger sure than than than the average human um so why do we control the world and not in ch ches or the neandertals because chimpanzees and neandertals they could cooperate only at a level of say a 100 individuals more top Homo sapiens have learned to cooperate in unlimited numbers thousands and then millions and today billions and when in in the Stone Age if

it's a it's a competition between 15 yandal and 500 sapiens the sapiens win easily and if it's it's today competition between 50 chimpanzees and 8 billion sapiens who cooperate at least in some Fields like science like the global trade Network you can say that all 8 billion humans on the planet today they cooperate in some ways so it's obvious why we control the planet and it's because we can construct this really big sophisticated networks of

cooporation and these networks are fueled by information I think this is a part of the also part of the Sapien story that I think connected me and Ryan where after reading this idea that it's the shared story that humans have was like kind of now seeing the Matrix like once you once you wake up to that fact uh just the reality of how humans cooperate is just like fundamentally changed once you perceive this idea of it's all coordination through communication through data um maybe you could also

talk about the consequences that result once these information networks grow larger and larger uh a tribe with a shared story of 200 people has different levels of consequences versus when there's 8 billion people here yeah um obviously if a tribe of a few hundred a key point to understand is that to create whether it's tribes or modern Nations or churches uh you don't do it with the truth you usually do it with some kind of fictional or mythological

story it's most obvious in the case of religion but it's also true in the economic sphere I guess we'll talk about it later but money is a fiction money is not something that points at reality money is like music it's a fictional story that as long as many people believe it we can all dance together to the same monetary tune and um again it's very effective in terms of large scale cooporation but the

danger is that your connect people with fictions and occasionally with delusions and lies uh and this can have very dangerous consequences and we see it again like in the 20th century that you can create an extremely powerful and sophisticated Information Network like the Soviet Union which is held together by extremely delusional ideas about humanity and society and economics and

again when you have immense power in the service of mass delusion what you get is things like the gulags and things like an extreme totalitarian uh uh system that crushes the spirit and sometimes the lives of hundreds of millions of people and this has happened again and again throughout history and we don't see any improvement over time and we only we only see Improvement in scale we don't see

Improvement in which makes the danger bigger right you know if you had if a stone AG tribe had some delusion about the Tribal Spirit or whatever so the consequences were limited maybe a couple of hundred people could be killed or there would have been some small scale ecological disaster but to in the 20th century and even more so in the 21st century when we have nuclear weapons and AIS and and Industrial technology the consequences can be millions and millions of dead people and

even the annihilation of human civilization itself for most of History even if you think about I don't know the Roman Empire or the the Mongol Empire jisan could not destroy human civilization it could cause massive Slaughter but eventually people would pick up the pieces and start again with the type of Technology we have developed over the last 100 years uh if we make a big mistake or if some of us make a big mistake this could be game overh you

sort of wonder what jangus Khan would have done with the nuclear launch codes when you replay that counterfactual in history I I let's not do that we're going to go through kind of a a brief history of these information networks in a second but before we do there's another thing I think uh we want to set up that you set up uh in your book which is I'll call these the the two villains of the book these are kind of negative uh attractor basins or like failure modes for when how information networks can go wrong and so the first villain is

the naive view of information these aren't actual villains these are idea villains let's say and the second is kind of the the populist view of information networks let's define both of those things because I think it's going to be a recurring theme as we talk about the history of these information networks so what is the naive view of information and why is it wrong well the naive view which is of the semi-official religion of places like Silicon Valley is that more information is always good for us that information is is is truth or

information is the raw material of Truth so if you just produce more and more information if you just flood the world with more information this will result necessarily inevitably in a rise in knowledge and wisdom and life would improve and this is simply wrong this is a misunderstanding as we said earlier most information isn't truth so and and again information in a completely kind of free market of information the truth is likely to lose to fiction because

fiction has these inherent advantages it's cheaper to produce it's more simple and it's more more attractive and it's no coincidence that you know we now have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to talk with each other you look at at politics let's say in the United States You can disagree about many many things but one thing that Democrats and Republicans I think could could agree on is that the conversation is simply breaking down that people can no longer agree on even

basic facts that people can no longer hold a reasoned debate and listen to each other so we have this seemingly Paradox that the most sophisticated information technology in history and a breakdown in the conversation and if you think oh this is just unique American phenomena because of this unique social or political condition of the US no you see the same thing is happening in Brazil the same thing is happening in France the same thing is happening in the Philippines so the problem is not in

the unique politics of or social situation of a specific country but of the underlying information technology which is based on this naive view that we just need to increase the volume and speed of information and everything would okay and again this is a lesson that have been should have been learned uh many many centuries ago because every time a new information technology appears you see the same thing uh you I hear people in Silicon Valley give these

historical examples like the way that the print Revolution led to the Scientific Revolution this is nonsense the print Revolution did not lead to the Scientific Revolution at least about 200 years had to pass between between Gutenberg and his printing press in the middle of the 15th century until you see the flowering of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century what you have in between is a period when Europe is flooded with new information coming

from the printing press but most of it is junk and it leads to the worst peak of the wars of religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th Century with the 30 Years War being probably the worst war in European history until the world wars of the 20th century you see the peak of The Witch Hunt craze witch hunting which we associate often with the Middle Ages it's actually a modern phenomena which

has a lot to do with the print Revolution Europeans in the Middle Ages didn't care very much about witches uh but after print came along a conspiracy theory appeared that the is a global conspiracy of Satan worshiping witches which uh tries to destroy human civilization and some of the biggest bests sellers of early modern Europe Advanced this conspiracy theory it was not people did not read Copernicus and with his complicated mathematical

calculations about astronomy this was boring they preferred I mean the biggest bestseller was a book called The Hammer of the witches and just to give you a flavor of what this book was like there was a chapter in the Hummer of the witches again biggest bestseller uh in the late 15th century Europe about how witches steal penises from men so this is like 1500's fake news ex this is 15500 Q on fake news Q on and uh

it's like so the bring evidence like the the the author hin CL who was a completely deluded and mentally unstable person but he shaped the world with the printing press with with his book he tells the story of a man who wakes up in the morning to discover that his penis is gone so and Nightmare scenario so nightmare scenario so he goes to the Village witch because he suspects that he she stole his penis and then the v v

Village witch manages to kind of course or bring me back my penis and she says okay okay okay climb this tree and you find a bird's nest at the top of the tree so he climbs the Tree finds a bird's nest in the bird's nest he finds a lot of penises that the witch stole from different men in the village course and she said okay you can take yours but he wants to take the biggest one so she tells him no no no no no you can't take that one This one belongs to the parish priest now this was number one