Living as a human in an “always on” digital world | Yuval Noah Harari

• Part of what's happening now in the world is this kind of tension between organic animals. We are organic animals and an inorganic digital system, which is increasingly controlling and shaping the entire world. Now, part of being an organic entity is that you live by cycles: day and night, winter and summer, growth and decay. Sometimes you are active, sometimes you need to relax; you need to rest.

Now, algorithms and AIs and computers, they are not organic. They never need rest. They are on all the time. And the big question is whether we adapt to them or they adapt to us. And more and more, of course, we have to adapt to them. We have to be on all the time. So the new cycle is always on. And everything we say, even when we are supposedly relaxing with friends, it can be public.

So the whole of life becomes like this one long job interview. Any stupid thing you did in some college party when you were 18, it can meet you down the road 10, 20 years later. And this is destructive to how we function. You even think about the market. Like Wall Street, as far as I know, it's open Monday to Fridays, 9:30 to 4 in the afternoon. If on Friday at five minutes past 4, a new war erupts in the Middle East, the market will react only on Monday. It's still running by organic cycles. Now, what would happen to human bankers and financiers? And so, what is happening, when the market is always active you can never relax.

• Have you talked to folks like Sam Altman who runs OpenAI or the folks at Microsoft? I know Bill Gates was a big fan of your books in the past, or the folks at Google? What do they say when you discuss this with them? And do you trust them as humans when you've met them? Do you go, "I trust you, Sam Altman?" (audience laughing)

• Most of them are afraid. They understand—

• Afraid of you, or afraid of AI?

• No, afraid of what they are doing, afraid of what is happening. They understand better than anybody else the potential, including the destructive potential of what they are creating. And they are very afraid of it. At the same time, their basic schtick is that, "I'm a good guy and I'm very concerned about it. Now you have these other guys; they are bad. They don't have the same kind of responsibility that I have. So it would be very bad for humanity if they create it first. So I must be the one who creates it first. And you can trust me that, that I will know, I will at least do my best to keep it under..." And everybody is saying it.

And I think that, to some extent, they're genuine about it. There is of course also this another element in there of extreme kind of pride and hubris that they are doing the most important thing in basically not just the history of humanity, but the history of life.

• Do you think they are?

• They could be, yes. If you think about the timeline of the universe, at least as far as we know it. So you have basically two stops. First stop, 4 billion years ago, the first organic life forms emerge on planet Earth. And then for 4 billion years, nothing major happens. Like for 4 million years, it's more of the same; it's more organic stuff. So you have amoebas, and you have dinosaurs, and you have humans, but it's all organic.

And then here comes Elon Musk or Sam Altman and does the second important thing in the history of the universe, the beginning of inorganic evolution. 'Cause AI is just at the very, very beginning of its evolutionary process. It's basically like 10 years old, 15 years old. We haven't seen anything yet. GPT-4 and all these things, they are the amoebas of AI evolution. And who knows how the AI dinosaurs are going to look like? But the name on the inflection point of the history of the universe, if that name is Elon Musk or that name is Sam Altman, that's a big thing.

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