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Yuval Noah Harari
287 quotes
“[I]t's completely different from the human mind. The whole question of "when will AI reach the same level... as human intelligence?" This is ridiculous. It's like asking, "When will airplanes finally be like birds?" They will never, ever be like birds.., and they can do many... things that birds can't. ...AIs and humans ...are not on the same trajectory behind us. They are on a completely different trajectory, for better or for worse.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he fact that AIs... cannot cooperate so far... is wonderful news. I hope it's true. I hope it will remain like that, otherwise we are in very... deep trouble.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he lesson from the history about intelligence: You don't need a lot of intelligence to change the world and potentially to cause havoc. You can change the world with relatively little intelligence. ...I'm not referring to anybody in particular.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The other thing we've learned about intelligence is that the most intelligent entities on the planet can also be the most deluded. Human beings are by far, so far, the most intelligent beings on the planet and the most deluded. We believe ridiculous things that no chimpanzee or dog or pig would ever dream of believing.., that if you... kill other people.., after you die, you go to heaven... because of the wonderful thing you did: you killed... these other members of your species.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I say that you can change the world with relatively little intelligence: Humans have already done much of the hard work for the AIs. ...[I]f you drop an AI in the middle of the African and tell it, "Take over the world!" It can't. ...But, if first you have these apes who build all these bureaucratic systems, like the , and then... drop the AI into the existing financial system.., that's... much easier. ...You don't need motor skills. You don't need even to understand the world. ...The financial system is the ideal playground for AI. It's... purely informational.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]o train AIs to make a million dollars, create a million AIs. Give them some seed money. ...[I]f ...a few AIs succeeded.., replicate them.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What happens to the world if more and more of the financial system is shaped by AIs..? Even though they can't walk down the street, they know how to invest money better than humans. It's a... very limited intelligence...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Social media is run to some extent by very primitive AIs, these algorithms that control our news feed... [etc.] Look what they did in 10 years. We created a human system, media, and then we introduced the AIs into our system... [I]t's an informational system, and they took it over, and... to a large extent, wrecked the world.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are not the only reason... for the mess now in the world, but if you think about what extremely primitive AIs did within the human created system... of media, then...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are at a point when we are conducting this huge historical experiment, and we just don't know... how do we build a self-correcting mechanism into it? How do we make sure that if we get the answer wrong, we'll have a second chance?”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The model... is the last big , which is the Industrial Revolution. When the Industrial Revolution begins in the early 19th century, nobody has an idea how to build a benign, good . This immense new power: steam engines, railroads, steam ships. How do you use them for good? ...[D]ifferent people have different ideas, and they experiment...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“European imperialism was one experiment. Some people say, "The only way to build an industrial society is to build an empire. You cannot build an industrial society on the level of one country because you must control the and the markets. You must have an empire!”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then you have people who say, "It must be a totalitarian society. Only a totalitarian system like Bolshevism or... Nazism. The immense powers of industry can only be controlled by a totalitarian society.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]ooking back from the early 21st century... we can say, "Oh, we know what the answer was. We think we know." It took 200 years of terrible wars, and hundreds of millions... of casualties, and injuries that are not even healed today, to find out how to build a benign . And this was just steam engines!”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now we are dealing with potentially superintelligent agents. Nobody has any experience with building a hybrid human AI society. We should be a lot more humble... We think we know how to build it! No we don't!”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]ow do we build a self-correcting mechanism so if we make the wrong bet, this is not the end?”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Social consequences are a completely different thing. You cannot run history in a laboratory and see... the social consequences of invent[ion]. ...You create the first steam engine, you can test for accidents. You cannot test what will be the geopolitical... or cultural implications of a steam engine in a laboratory. It's the same with AI. So it's... far too soon to know.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm mainly concerned about the lack of concern that... we are creating, we are deploying.., maybe the most powerful technology in human history, and a lot of very smart and powerful people are worried about.., "What will the investors say in the next quarterly report?" They think in terms of a few months, or a year or two.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history… At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades?”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history", The Guardian (25 September 2011)
“Dualism... has a... simple answer to the... Problem of Evil... Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain... suffering... One... explanation.., [w]ere there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil.., hence... no free will. Dualisim... is unnerved by the Problem of Order. ...[I]f Good and Evil battle for control... who enforces the laws. [M]onotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. ...[S]olving the riddle: ...there is a single omnipotent God... and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D-virtual-reality worlds, that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their time devouring artificial experiences in ?”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have participated in numerous private and public debates about gay marriage, and all too often some wise guy asks ‘If marriage between two men is OK, why not allow marriage between a man and a goat?’ From a secular perspective the answer is obvious. Healthy relationships require emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth. A marriage lacking such depth will make you frustrated, lonely and psychologically stunted. Whereas two men can certainly satisfy the emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of one another, a relationship with a goat cannot. Hence if you see marriage as an institution aimed at promoting human well-being – as secular people do – you would not dream of even raising such a bizarre question. Only people who see marriage as some kind of miraculous ritual might do so.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One would have thought that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can you name a great work of art inspired by the Old Testament? Oh, that's easy: Michelangelo's David, Verdi's Nabucco, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. Do you know of any famous work inspired by the New Testament? Piece of cake: Leonardo's Last Supper, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Monty Python's Life of Brian. Now for the real test: can you list a few masterpieces inspired by the Talmud?Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play an important role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the European voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented by Gentiles.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories—the liberal, the fascist, the communist—is that the big heroes of the story were the common people. Not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim. But when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of, you know, these big ideas and big words about "machine learning" and "genetic engineering" and "blockchain" and "globalization", and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future. And I think that—again, this is a hypothesis—if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world, part of what might be going on there is people realize—and they're correct in thinking that—that, "The future doesn't need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and global connectivity and whatnot, and they don't need me. So maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way, like universal basic income." But it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (13:59). The TED Audio Collective, 2022.
“Yuval Noah Harari: If you go back to the middle of the 20th century—and it doesn't matter if you're in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you're in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin—and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don't have any kind of future without them. And now, fast forward to the early 21st century, when we just don't need the vast majority of the population. Chris Anderson: Because? Yuval Noah Harari: Because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like, again, artificial intelligence, bioengineering. Most people don't contribute anything to that, except perhaps their data. And whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant, and will make it possible to replace the people.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (16:32). The TED Audio Collective, 2022.
“Humans are organic beings who live by cyclical biological time. ... Even the money market respects these biological cycles. The New York Stock Exchange is open Monday to Friday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, and is closed on holidays like Independence Day and New Year’s Day. If a war erupts at 4:01 p.m. on a Friday, the market won’t react to it until Monday morning. In contrast, a network of computers can always be on. Computers are consequently pushing humans toward a new kind of existence in which we are always connected and always monitored. In some contexts, like health care, this could be a boon. In other contexts, like for citizens of totalitarian states, this could be a disaster. Even if the network is potentially benign, the very fact that it is always on might be damaging to organic entities like humans, because it will take away our opportunities to disconnect and relax. If an organism never has a chance to rest, it eventually collapses and dies. But how will we get a relentless network to slow down and allow us some breaks?”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imagine a situation—in twenty years, say—when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel, and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony? What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control? Such a situation can lead to a new kind of data colonialism in which control of data is used to dominate faraway colonies. Mastery of AI and data could also give the new empires control of people’s attention. As we have already discussed, in the 2010s American social media giants like Facebook and YouTube upended the politics of distant countries like Myanmar and Brazil in pursuit of profit. Future digital empires may do something similar for political interests.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the Silicon Curtain. The Silicon Curtain is made of code, and it passes through every smartphone, computer, and server in the world. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the Silicon Curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention, and where your data flows. It is becoming difficult to access information across the Silicon Curtain, say between China and the United States, or between Russia and the EU. Moreover, the two sides are increasingly run on different digital networks, using different computer codes. Each sphere obeys different regulations and serves different purposes.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e are thinking on different time scales. ...A lot of the conversations here in Davos.., when they say "long term" they mean like 2 years. When I say long term I mean like 200 years. It's like, it's the Industrial Revolution. The first commercial railway has been opened between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830. This is now... 1835, and we are having this discussion. People are saying, "The Industrial Revolution is moving so slowly. They told us that railways and steam engines will change the world. So what? So a few people are going between Manchester and Liverpool. It didn't change anything. This is all science fiction. Because of the time scale, we have no idea. Even if... all progress in AI stops today, the stone has been thrown into the pool, but it just hit the water. We have no idea what are the waves, even by the AIs that already have been deployed, say a year or two ago.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source