when yuval noah harari published his first book sapiens in 2014 about the history of the
human species it became a global bestseller in turn the little-known israeli history professor
into one of the most popular writers and thinkers on the planet
but when we met with harari in tel aviv this summer it wasn't our species past that concerned
him it was our future harare believes we may be on the brink of creating not just a new enhanced
species of human but an entirely new kind of being one that's far more intelligent than we are
it sounds like science fiction but you've all know a harare says it's
actually much more dangerous than that the story will continue in a moment
you said we are one of the last generations of homo sapiens within a century or two earth will be
dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from chimpanzees yeah
what the hell does that mean that freaked me out you know we'll soon have the power
to re-engineer our bodies and brains whether it is with genetic engineering or by directly connecting
brains to computers or by creating completely non-organic entities
artificial intelligence which is not based at all on the organic body and the organic brain
and these technologies are developing at breakneck speed if that is true then it
creates a whole other species this is something which is way beyond just another species you all
know a harare is talking about the race to develop artificial intelligence as well as
other technologies like gene editing that could one day enable parents to create smarter or more
attractive children and brain computer interfaces that could result in human machine hybrids
what does that do to a society i mean it seems like the rich will have access whereas
others wouldn't one of the dangers is that we will see in the coming decades a process of
greater inequality than in any previous time in history because for the first time it will
be real biological inequality if the new technologies are available only to the rich
or only to people from a certain country then homo sapiens will split into different
biological costs because they really have different bodies and different abilities
ferrari has spent the last few years lecturing and writing about what may lie ahead for humankind
in the coming generations we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds he's
written two books about the challenges we face in the future homo deus and 21 lessons for the 21st
century which along with sapiens have sold more than 35 million copies and been translated into
65 languages his writings have been recommended by president barack obama as well as tech moguls
bill gates and mark zuckerberg you raise warnings about technology you're also embraced by a lot of
folks in silicon valley yeah isn't that sort of a contradiction they are a bit afraid of their
own power that they have realized the immense influence they have over the world over the
course of evolution really and i think that spooks at least some of them and that's a good thing
um and this is why they are kind of to some extent open to listening you started as a
history professor what do you call yourself now i'm still a historian but i think history is the
study of change not just the study of the past but it covers the future as well harari got his
phd in history at oxford and lives in israel where the past is still very present he took
us to this archaeological site called tel gezer four five thousand years ago this was one of the
biggest cities in the area harare says cities like this were only possible because about 70
000 years ago our species homo sapiens experienced a cognitive change that helped us create language
which then made it possible for us to cooperate in large groups and drive neanderthals and all other
less cooperative human species into extinction harare fears we are now the ones at risk of
being dominated by artificial intelligence maybe the biggest thing that we are facing is really
a kind of evolutionary divergence for millions of years intelligence and consciousness went together
consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate
intelligence is the ability to solve problems but computers or artificial intelligence
they don't have consciousness they just have intelligence they solve problems in a completely
different way than us now in science fiction it's often assumed that as computers will become
more and more intelligent they will inevitably also gain consciousness but actually it's much
more frightening than that in a way they will be able to solve more and more problems better than
us without having any consciousness any feelings and they will have power over us they are already
gaining power over us some lenders routinely use complex artificial intelligence algorithms to
determine who qualifies for loans global financial markets are moved by decisions made by machines
analyzing huge amounts of data in ways even their programmers don't always understand
harare says the countries and companies that control the most data will in the future be the
ones that control the world today in the world data is worth much more than money 10 years ago
you had these big corporations paying billions and billions for whatsapp for instagram and people
wondered are they crazy why do they pay billions to get this application that doesn't produce any
money and the reason why because it produced data and data is the key the world is increasingly kind
of cut up into spheres of of of data collection of data harvesting uh in the cold war you had the
iron curtain now we have the silicon curtain between the usa and china and where does the
data go california or does it go to shenzhen and to shanghai into beijing harare is concerned the
pandemic has opened the door for more intrusive kinds of data collection including biometric data
what is biometric data it's data about what's happening inside my body what we've seen so far
it's corporations and governments collecting data about where we go who we meet what movies we watch
the next phase is the surveillance going under our skin i'm wearing a like a tracker that tracks
my heart rate my sleep i don't know where that information is going where are the kgb agent on
your wrist willingly and i think it's benefiting me and it is benefiting i mean the whole thing is
that it's not just dystopian it's also utopian i mean this kind of data can also enable us to
create the best healthcare system in history the question is what else is being done with that data
and who supervises it who regulates it earlier this year the israeli government gave its citizens
health data to pfizer to get priority access to their vaccine the data did not include individual
citizens identities so what does pfizer want the data of all israelis for because to develop new
medicines new treatments you need the medical data increasingly that's the basis for how for medical
research and of course it's not all bad harare has been criticized for pointing out problems
without offering solutions but he does have some ideas about how to limit the misuse of data
one key rule is that if you get my data the data should be used to help me
and not to manipulate me another key rule that whenever you increase surveillance of individuals
you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the corporation and governments and the people
at the top and the third principle is that never allow all the data to be concentrated in one place
that's the recipe for a dictatorship netflix tells us what to watch and amazon tells us what to buy
eventually within 10 or 20 or 30 years such algorithms could also tell you what to study
at college and where to work and whom to marry and even whom to vote for without greater regulation
harare believes we're at risk of becoming what he calls hacked humans what does that
mean to hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves
and based on that to increasingly manipulate you this outside system it has the potential
to remember everything everything you ever did and uh to analyze and find patterns in this data
and to get a much better idea of who you really are i came out as gay when i was 21
it should have been obvious to me when i was 15 that i'm gay but something in the mind blocked it
now if you think about a teenager today facebook can know that they are gay or amazon can know that
they are gay long before they do just based on analyzing patterns and based on that you can tell
somebody's sexual orientation completely and what does it mean if you live in iran or if you live
in russia or in some other homophobic country and the police know that you're gay even before
you know it when people think about data they think about companies finding out what their
likes and dislikes are but the data that you're talking about it goes much deeper than that like
think in 20 years when the entire personal history of every journalist every judge every politician
every military officer is held by somebody in beijing or in washington your ability to
manipulate them is like nothing before in history it's really good ferrari lives outside tel aviv
with his husband itsekyahav they've been together for nearly 20 years it was yahov who read harare's
lecture notes for a history course and convinced him to turn them into his first book sapiens
i read the lessons i couldn't stop talking about it for me it was clear that it could be
a huge bestseller yahov is now hirari's agent and together they started a company called
sapienship they're creating an interactive exhibit that'll take visitors through the history of human
evolution and challenge them to think about the future of mankind harare also just published the
second installment of a graphic novel based on sapience and he's teaching courses at israel's
hebrew university in ethics and philosophy for computer scientists and bioengineers
when people write code they are reshaping politics and economics and ethics and the
structure of human society when i think of coders and engineers i don't think of philosophers and
poets it's not the case now but it should be the case because they are increasingly
solving philosophical and poetical riddles if you're designing you know a self-driving car
so the self-driving car will need to make ethical decisions
like suddenly a kid jumps in front of the car and the only way to to to prevent running over the kid
is to swerve to the side and be hit by a truck and your own owner who is asleep in the back seat
will might be killed you need to tell the algorithm what to do in this situation
so you need to actually solve the philosophical question who to kill
last month the united nations suggested a moratorium on artificial intelligence systems that
seriously threaten human rights until safeguards are agreed upon and advisers to president biden
are proposing what they call a bill of rights to guard against some of the new technologies harori
says just as homo sapiens learned to cooperate with each other many thousands of years ago
we need to cooperate now certainly now we are at the point when we need global cooperation
you cannot regulate the explosive power of artificial intelligence on a national level
i'm not trying to kind of prophesy what will happen i'm trying to warn people about the most
dangerous possibilities in the hope that we will do something in the present to prevent them