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歴史学者 Yuval Noah Harari の凄まじかった洞察力 （追加）

· 52 min read
20171219_Harari_pic.jpg

はじめに​

私の楽しみの一つは Scott Adams のようなずば抜けて非凡な人物を Blog や Youtube で見つけること。

昨日、Youtube で見つけた非凡な人物が Yuval Noah Harari で、イスラエルの歴史学者。こういう歴史学者は見たことがない。

その Yuval Noah Harari の並外れた洞察力がよくわかるラジオ・インタビューを紹介する。

Yuval Noah Harari の発言の一部には Ray Kurzweil のソレに近いものがあるが、洞察力においても知性の広がりにおいても Ray Kurzweil は全く比較にならない。Yuval Noah Harari はドグマをドグマとして捉え、盲信していない。

なお、別の動画で彼はゲイだと告白していた。

以下、メモ書き。（このメモ書きでは彼の洞察の凄まじさが全く伝わらない。出がらしですらない。読み返してみて自分の文章表現力（＋表現意欲）の無さを実感w。実際に下の動画の発言を聴かなければ、凄さが伝わない筈。）

履歴​

(2024-10-15) 追加（文字起こし＋和訳）。動画の差替。

(2017-12-19) 作成。歴史学者 Yuval Noah Harari の凄まじい洞察力

抜粋（デタラメ）​

  • 5:30 かつての意味の戦争は消えた。

  • 9:00 40億年間、有機体生命が発展してきた。現在、市場初めて非有機体の AI による生命が生まれようとしている。

  • 10:00 古代のヘブライ人が神に期待した能力（…）を既に現代科学は超えた。

  • 12:00 21世紀の最大のマーケットは「永遠の若さ」になる。

  • 13:00 シリコン・バレーが目指しているのは…。永遠に生きられる薬ではない。この先、10年先も健康で過ごせるようになる薬。10年ごとに更新。

  • 14:00 金持ちは貧乏人よりも身心ともに快適な状態を保つようになる。一端、そうなればそのギャップは解消不能。なぜなら貧乏人はもう太刀打ちできないから。

  • 18:00 AI に仕事を取られて、役立たずの階級の人間が大量に生まれる。彼らは経済的にも政治的にもパワーをもたない。

  • 18:20 知性が意識と分離するという危険がある。知性は問題を解決する能力。意識は感知する能力。つまり主観的な体験をするのが意識。

  • 19:00 SF作品などでは先進的 AI が自動的に意識（感情、欲望など）を持つと見なしている。だが、現段階でそれは起きていない。

  • 19:50 過去 60～70年間に AI の知性は劇的に発展した。だが AI の意識の発展はゼロだ。1940年代のコンピュータは意識も感情も持っていなかった。そして現代のコンピュータも同じく意識や感情を持たない。

  • この傾向が続き、将来のコンピュータも意識を持たないままでありうる。将来の AI が超知性を持ちながら、完全に意識を欠如しているものでありうる。

  • 21:00 銀河系のほとんどの知性が意識を持たないかも。

  • 24:00 自動運転車の判断基準。5人の歩行者と一人の運転者の生命の選択。車の購入者に選択させる。なぜなら…マーケットは常に正しい（…という従来の仮説）

  • 27:00 ヒューマニズムの核は…。人間は意味を放棄して代わりにパワーを得る。具体的には…

    • だが、これはもはや幻想だと判明した。

  • 30:00 Humans aren't individuals, they are dividuals.

  • 30:40 150年間に及ぶ生物学の研究結果の結論はを要約すると…。

    • organisms are algorithms

    • ヒヒがライオンとバナナの環境で。アルゴリズム、計算結果は感情として。食欲が勝つか、恐怖心が勝つか。つまり感情は神から与えられたスピリチュアルなものではない。感情は生化学的な計算結果だ。

  • 34:00 self(自我)というものは無い。人間は他の動物と同じく、生化学的なプロセスの集合体でしかない。

  • 34:00 あたりのオハナシが精神世界のソレと完全に同型。

  • 36:00 個人も幻想に支配されている。個人は自己に関する虚構の物語を構築し、それに強烈に固着する。その自己の物語が彼の人生を支配する。この自己の物語は要するに幻想だが、とても強力に作用する。人類社会全体も全く同様（神、天国、国家などなど）。

  • 36:20 個人の内側にあって人格を統合する自己が存在するという見解も幻想。individual も幻想であって、実体は dividuals の集合だ。

  • 37:00 私は本当の自分を知るために毎日 2時間、 Vipassana 瞑想を続けている。先に述べたことは現代の科学のドグマだ。科学が説明し損ねているものが一つある。それは意識だ。どうやて数十億のニューロンが愛や嫌悪、喜び、苦しみを生み出すのか？　我々はこれについては完全に無知だ。

  • 38:00 だからと言って過去の宗教的ドグマに戻ることはできない。さらに研究を続ける必要がある。

  • 40:00 今の人類は 200年先には存在していないだろう。upgrade human --> super human

  • 41:50 従来の技術は外界（環境、社会、経済）を変化させるものだった。だが、今後は人間の体、脳を変化させるものになる。

  • 44:00 21世紀には新たなイデオロギー、宗教が生まれる筈。19世紀に社会主義が生まれたように。

  • 44:40 その兆候として今、data-izm （データ主義）が主導権をにぎりつつある。

  • 45:00 昔は雲（cloud）の上の神が権威だった。近代はその権威が雲から個々人に降りてきた（個人主義、リベラリズム…）。これからは権威が再び cloud に戻るだろう。ただし Google などの cloud（クラウド）だ。

  • 46:00 Homo Deus（神としての人間） の説明。

  • 47:30 作曲プログラム Emmy , David Cope? musicologist University of California

    • その音楽の一部が聞ける。（予想どおりで意外性は無いw）
20171219_item.jpg

動画（53:05）​

Y. N. Harari - Immortality, Bliss, Divinity

コメント​

彼の洞察力の凄まじさには感動したが、私は彼の主張には同意しない。

彼の主張に同意できないが、彼の主張には洞察と説得力があることを認めざるをえない。それが私を含む典型的な凡人の反応。凡人連中にそういう反応を引き起こさせる…それこそが彼の非凡さの証。

同様のパターンは Scott Adams （非凡）の発言を聞いた Sam Harris （凡人）の反応でも見られた。Sam Harris は決してナミの凡人ではないが、Scott Adams と対面した時にその知性の格差が露呈した。

この格差の状況を喩えると…。何かの集まりで、一人の「かわいい娘」のまわりに男どもが群がってチヤホヤしている。その場にトップ・モデルのようなゴージャスな美人が登場。一瞬で先の かわいい娘 の男どもの間での市場価値が暴落…w

(2017-12-19 end)

(2024-10-15 begin)

前置き​

動画が消えているので、同じ内容の別の動画を追加しておく。ついでに文字起こし、そして彼に対する現在の私の評価も記録しておく。

動画(53:37)​

Yuval Noah Harari | talks about Immortality, Happiness and Divinity (A Must Hear)

動画概要欄​

49,300 views Mar 28, 2018 Interview of Yuval Noah Harari Full Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK9U... Thanks for watching!

FasterWhisper AI(large-v2 model) + DeepL(2024-07 model)​

▼和訳 展開

後日

▼文字起こし 原文 展開

I'm Paul Kennedy and this is Ideas. Humans are rarely satisfied with what they already have. Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier. Yuval Harari is a celebrated thinker. His book Sapiens, about the history of our species, was an international sensation. It was translated into 30 languages, including English, which allowed me to talk to him here at Ideas. Now he's back with another big picture book, and in it he looks towards the future of humanity. (0:00:41)

When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plagues and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry? If we're actually on the verge of eliminating famine, plagues and war, as Yuval Harari says we are, then where does that leave us? Humanity's next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity. (0:01:13)

Having reduced mortality from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo Deus. Homo Deus is the title of Yuval Harari's latest book. He joined me in our Toronto studio to talk about the future as he sees it, a future where humans become like gods. (0:01:53)

Let me tell you, it was a mind-bending experience. Yuval, famine, plague and war are still very much with us. What gives you the idea that they're going away? Well, we still have definitely famine, plague and war around, but far less than in any previous time in history. Today, for the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little. (0:02:18)

More people die from old age than infectious diseases. More people die from killing themselves or suicide than from war and crime and terrorism put together. And if you look at famine especially, which was the biggest threat to human life for thousands of years, today, actually, there is no longer any natural famine in the world. There is only political famine. If people still starve to death in places like Syria or North Korea or Somalia, it's not because of an objective lack of food. (0:02:54)

It is because some politician or government or ideology wants them to starve to death. And I think that given the progress we've accomplished so far, it's not certain, but it's likely that in the 21st century, we'll be able to bring them under our control. Okay, well, moving from famine to plague, we might not have the Black Death anymore, but we have AIDS. We have malaria. There's cancer. There's new diseases. (0:03:24)

I mean, you know, bird flu and Zika. I mean, there's various viruses that are new. Is disease disappearing? It seems like it's coming. Disease is changing. I mean, for most of history, the main threat was infectious diseases and epidemics, which killed up to a third or a half of all children before they reached adulthood, and which every few decades you had something like the Black Death coming and killing maybe a quarter or a third of the entire population. (0:03:56)

In the last few decades, the advances in medicine have managed to bring down a mortality of children from infectious diseases to the lowest level ever. (0:04:09)

And managed not to completely stop all epidemics, but to avoid a repeat of the Black Death or of the Spanish influenza. For example, when you had the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, initially, experts feared that this is the beginning of the new Black Death. But within about three months, they managed to bring Ebola under control. And in the end, Ebola killed 10,000 people, which is a terrible thing. (0:04:40)

But it's a completely different story than the Black Death, which killed something like 40 or 50 million people. Okay, now that's famine, then, and plague, war. You come from Israel. How can you say that war is going away? Yes, I mean, again, you just look at the statistics, first of all, for much of history, maybe about 10% of human mortality was because of human violence. (0:05:03)

Today, all over the world, globally, it's about just 1%, or maybe a little more than 1%. Especially if you look at places like Canada, statistically, the chances of the average Canadian being killed by, let's say, Al-Qaeda or ISIS is about a thousand times less than the chances of dying from eating too much at McDonald's. And McDonald's is a thousand times more dangerous to the health of our audience than the Islamic State. But you don't hear it in the news because it doesn't make news. (0:05:40)

And even more importantly, previously in history, we had periods of peace, but peace always was a temporary situation. The meaning of peace was the temporary absence of war. Everybody knew that, let's say, in the Middle Ages, you had peace between the King of England and the King of France. Something might happen that within one year they will go to war against one another. (0:06:07)

So peace was just the temporary absence of war. Today, in most of the world, peace has a completely new meaning. Peace means the implausibility of war. It's simply unthinkable that Britain and France will go to war next year. And this is true not only in Western Europe. This is true in most of the world. There are exceptions, of course, like the Middle East. But in most of the world, if you think, for example, about South America, you have to be really crazy to think that next year there might be a big war between Brazil and Argentina. There might be a little border incident, but an old-fashioned war with Brazilian armored divisions trying to conquer Buenos Aires and Argentinian airplanes bombing entire cities in Brazil. This is extremely unlikely to happen. (0:06:59)

They just don't think along these lines anymore. Okay. Well, then, if you dismiss with famine and with plague and with war, what you've done is you've replaced them with three other abstract nouns. Immortality, bliss, and divinity. That's a pretty big order. Now, why have you chosen those three? Well, this is my educated guess of where humanity is headed. What are the next big projects of humankind? (0:07:26)

And you already see it happening. (0:07:28)

In Silicon Valley, maybe the hottest word today is immortality. Equality may be out, but immortality is very much in. Google just established two or three years ago a subcompany called Calico, whose stated aim is to overcome death. They say, hey, we've solved search, so now we'll try to solve death. And they are not the only ones. You have people like Peter Thiel, who are also saying explicitly that what they want to do is to overcome old age and death. (0:08:00)

And similarly, if you think about bliss and even divinity, when I say that humans will try to upgrade themselves into gods in the 21st century, this is not meant as a metaphor. I mean it literally. If you think about the old gods of the traditional mythologies, like the Hebrew God, they have certain qualities, not just immortality, but maybe above all, the ability to create life, to design life. (0:08:26)

In the book of Genesis, the first thing God does is to create animals and plants and humans according to his wishes. Now we are in the process of acquiring these divine abilities. We want to learn how to engineer and produce life. And it's very likely that in the 21st century, the main products of the economy will no longer be textiles and vehicles and weapons. (0:08:55)

They will be bodies and brains and minds. And I'll say another thing, that we are actually trying to go beyond any of the traditional gods. Because even if you believe the creationists that say that all life has been created by God, then the only thing God managed to create in four billion years of life on Earth is organic beings. All the beings that existed on this planet for four billion years, whether amoebas or dinosaurs or giraffes or homo sapiens, they were organic creatures made of organic stuff. (0:09:32)

And now we are in the process of creating the first inorganic entities after four billion years of evolution. It's very likely that within the lifetime of at least some of our listeners, we will manage to create the first inorganic artificial intelligence entities. It sounds like you're not saying that we're going to be gods. We're going to be super gods. We're going to be gods that create gods. (0:09:59)

In a way, yes. I mean, again, if you think about ancient mythology, you read the Bible. The main thing that biblical Judaism was concerned with is agricultural output. The main thing the ancient Hebrews expected from their God was to provide rain so you'll be able to water your fields and to provide fertility and to provide protection against all kinds of locusts and diseases and things like that. (0:10:25)

And today, modern science is already doing much better than the Hebrew God. I mean, with all the insecticides and antibiotics and genetic crops and things like that, already today, what the Hebrews expected from their gods, our scientists are doing better. If you think religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless, just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and aging Hollywood starlets will do when they think the elixir of life is within reach. (0:11:01)

Even when science makes significant progress in the war against death, the real battle will shift from the laboratories to the parliaments, courthouses and streets. (0:11:12)

Once the scientific efforts are crowned with success, they will trigger bitter political conflicts. All the wars and conflicts of history might turn out to be but a pale prelude for the real struggle ahead of us, the struggle for eternal youth. Eternal youth, I want to focus on where you see that actually happening. I mean, isn't it already underway? Aren't people who go to the spa and who buy creams, aren't they looking for eternal youth? (0:11:39)

Everybody, not everybody, but most people definitely in modern Western societies are obsessed with youth and with eternal youth. I mean, until now, people knew that there was a limit to what you can do with going to the gym and buying creams and things like that. But just from an economic perspective, think what an immense market the market for eternal youth is going to be. (0:12:07)

I mean, most likely in the 21st century, the biggest market of all will be the market for eternal youth. Would you personally want to be young forever, to live forever as a young person? That's a good question. I mean, a lot of people, when they talk about immortality, they have a distorted vision of what it means that like you take a pill and you live to be a million. (0:12:33)

And this is not what the people in Silicon Valley are talking about, like Ray Kurzweil or Peter Thiel. What they have in mind is something far more down to earth that they will come to you and ask you, do you want to live another 10 years in good health? The vast majority of people will say, yes, I want another 10 years in good health. (0:12:56)

And then when these 10 years are over, they'll come again and say, OK, do you want another 10 years? It's a renewable contract. And this is what we're talking about. It's not a one-time pill that makes you live to be a million. Nobody understands what it means to live to be a million. Nobody really wants such a thing. But to extend your life a decade and another decade and another decade in good health, this is something that I think almost everybody would like to do. (0:13:25)

Everybody would like it, but who will be able to afford it? I mean, the way I know that Silicon Valley works, the prices go very high. But only for the 1% who can actually pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a pill that might give them 10 more years of life, healthy life. That's the big question. At present, it seems likely that it will not be available for everybody and that biotechnology will, for the first time in history, translate economic inequality into biological inequality. (0:13:57)

Throughout history, you always had inequality, but it was always social and economic and political. It wasn't biological. There wasn't any real difference in physical or mental abilities between the king and the peasant. But in 50 years or 100 years, it might be possible for the first time to translate economic inequality into biological inequality. (0:14:22)

And humankind will basically split into different biological costs. The rich will enjoy physical and mental abilities, which will really be superior to the poor. And once such a gap opens, it becomes almost impossible to close it. Because the poor will no longer be able to compete with the rich. This is a frightening brave new world. I mean, you're talking about a possible existence for most of humanity that will be so far below that of the upper echelons that it won't even be recognizable to them. (0:14:59)

It should be emphasized that this is not a prophecy. It's just a possibility. I mean, everything that the book Homo Deus describes, they are not prophecies. They are just mapping different possibilities. And if you don't like some of the possibilities, you can still do something about it. I don't think that technology is deterministic. With the same technology, you can create completely different social systems. (0:15:25)

If you look back, then you see that with the technology of the Industrial Revolution, trains and electricity and oil and radio, you could create a communist dictatorship, a fascist regime or a liberal democracy. The trains and the radio did not really tell you what to do with them. So it's the same with the technologies of the 21st century. If we just leave it to market forces, then I'm afraid that, yes, market forces will drive these technologies in the direction of the kind of brave new world with biologically different costs. (0:16:03)

But we don't have to allow market forces to make the important decisions for us. There is still some political options to take these developments in a different direction. I think that's an important thing. And you said it's not necessarily a prediction of what will happen. It might actually be a call to arms. And I want to get you to talk about that a little later. (0:16:25)

First, I want to push you back on something I asked you earlier. I asked if you wanted to live forever as a young person. You said it was an interesting question. You didn't answer the question. Do you want to live forever? Personally, I definitely don't want to die in the next 10 years. And I definitely don't want to age very much. If I can keep my physical and mental faculties as they are, then yes, I'm a good customer for these kinds of developments. (0:16:52)

I think it will be dishonest to pretend to be anything else. I mean, to get another 10 years of good health. Yeah, sure. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in 2100. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, what would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology? (0:17:27)

All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next. (0:17:39)

Computers are very much at the center of much of what you're talking about, and some people have used the word transhuman to describe where we're going, a point at which there's some sort of convergence between computer intelligence and human intelligence. I think Ray Kurzweil, who you mentioned, uses the word synchronicity, that the two will become similar, and in fact, at some point, they will pass. (0:18:01)

I'm wondering, how far do you see us going down that road? I think that artificial intelligence, AI, is now outperforming humans in more and more tasks, and therefore may even push humans out of the job market and will create an immense new class, the useless class. People who can't do anything better than an AI, better than computers, so they don't have any jobs and any political power. (0:18:29)

But looking even further to the future, I think the big danger is that intelligence will simply decouple from consciousness. A lot of people confuse intelligence with consciousness, because in humans and in all mammals, intelligence and consciousness go together. Intelligence basically is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, to have subjective experiences, to feel pain or joy or love or hate or anger or whatever. (0:19:03)

Now, we think of one of those being a sort of human territory and one of them being a computer or machine territory. What do you mean by decoupling? What's an example of them separating? Well, for millions of years of evolution in mammals and humans, intelligence and consciousness went together because the way mammals solve problem is to a large extent by relying on their feelings, on their sensations and on their emotions. (0:19:27)

And because they go together, people often have the idea that they must go together. And in many science fiction movies, when computers become super intelligent, they automatically also become conscious and they start having emotions and desires and all that. Now, this is definitely not what is happening now. Computers are not becoming conscious. They're becoming highly intelligent. Over the last 60 or 70 years, there has been a tremendous progress in computer intelligence, but exactly zero progress in computer consciousness. (0:20:05)

Computers in the 1940s had no consciousness, no feelings, and computers today have no consciousness and no feelings. If we look to the future, this trend may continue and we may see the emergence of a super intelligence, which is completely devoid of consciousness. And this super intelligence might make all humans powerless and redundant and may even break out of planet Earth because organic beings have been limited to this planet for four billion years because it's very difficult to sustain organic life in outer space or other planets. (0:20:43)

But a non organic artificial intelligence will find it much easier to survive space travel and to colonize other planets. So what we may see is not just on Earth, but in the entire galaxy, the spread of this in very high intelligence, but devoid of consciousness. (0:21:03)

And this is a very scary scenario to imagine, not just Earth, but the galaxy full of intelligence and devoid of consciousness, devoid of feelings and emotions. So in some real sense, natural selection, which Darwin talked about, which we've always thought was the way things were going to move along, is going to be replaced with market selection. Human beings are going to both be supplying what they want to sell and buying it as well. (0:21:31)

Yeah, I mean, the problem is that from the viewpoint of the market, consciousness has no value at all. But intelligence is what the market really values. If you think about something like a taxi driver. So up till now, all taxi drivers had consciousness, they had feelings, they had emotions. Why? Not because we need emotions from taxi drivers, but simply because the only thing intelligent enough to drive a taxi was human being, which came along in this package. (0:22:04)

You also got consciousness and emotions. But within a very short time, most experts today estimated within five or 10 years, AI will drive cars better than any human being, not only more cheaply, but far more safely. Today, every year, about 1.3 million people die each year from car accidents. That's twice the number of people who die from war and crime and terrorism put together. And almost all these car accidents are caused by human error. (0:22:39)

And if you replace humans with algorithms, with AI, you solve most of these errors. And AI, a self-driving car, will never drink alcohol and drive. It will never fall asleep while driving. It will never disobey traffic signals or a stop sign. (0:23:14)

So it's very likely that we will see, because what we need is the intelligence, not the consciousness, we will see that human drivers are being replaced by these computers, by these AI. And the world will be a better place? From an economic perspective, definitely, yes. But again, the big question is, do we want a situation in which eventually everything is super intelligent, but without consciousness, without emotions, without feelings? (0:23:33)

And this is, I think, a very deep philosophical question. And actually, speaking of philosophy, a lot of philosophical questions that for thousands of years were just theoretical riddles for philosophers to pass time may become practical questions in everyday life that engineers need to think about. Again, going back to these driverless cars, let's say that you have a car, that the car is driving, and it's about to collide, to run over five people. And the only way to save these five people is to swerve to the side, fall off a cliff, and kill the driver. (0:24:13)

What should you do? This is the kind of questions that philosophers have been arguing about for thousands of years, and it had very little practical impact, because no matter what you said in theory that you will do, when you are actually in the situation, you did something different. But now, when you have a driverless car, you need to program the algorithm that drives the car with the answer to these ethical questions. (0:24:41)

If a driverless car sees that it's about to run over five pedestrians, and it can swerve to the side, fall off a cliff, and kill its owner, what should it do? (0:24:51)

The engineers at Google, they need to program the code. So they need to answer this philosophical question. And the amazing thing is, whatever answer they give, it will actually be implemented. Now, of course, because we live in a market economy, maybe they will say, let's just leave it to market forces, to the customers. We'll produce two cars, the Toyota Altraist and the Toyota Egoist. The Toyota Altraist, if you buy it, when in this situation, it will kill you and save the five people. (0:25:22)

The Toyota Egoist will save you and kill the other five people. And customers will just decide which car they want to buy. And, you know, the customer is always right. That's beautiful. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM and cbc.ca slash ideas. We're talking with acclaimed historian Yuval Harari about his book, Homo Deus. The title, of course, translates as Man God, because that's what he believes is happening to our species. We're collectively in the process of becoming like gods, something our ancestors could only imagine in myths and legends. (0:26:08)

It's this kind of original intellectual portraiture that has won Yuval Harari a raft of international awards. You can see him on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. In a short video improvising on terms and ideas, we just kind of threw at him for fun. Here he is now, ruminating on a crucial term he writes about in his book, modernity. Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. Very few of us can ever resign or transcend this deal. It shapes our food, our jobs, and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love, and how we pass away. (0:26:55)

At first sight, modernity looks like an extremely complicated deal. It's like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract which is dozens of pages of legalese. You take one look at it, immediately scroll down to the last page, tick I agree, and forget about it. Yet in fact, modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase. Humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. (0:27:26)

Exchanging meaning for power. How does that, in your mind, define the modern era that we live in? Well, in pre-modern times, people believe that they are part of some cosmic drama, some cosmic play. They have a part to play. They don't have much power. I mean, they must do whatever God decides that they will. This is your part in creation. This is your part in the universe. (0:27:55)

So you don't have the power to change your role. But in exchange, you got meaning. Your life really meant something. You're playing maybe a small part, but you're still playing a part in this cosmic drama. And whatever I said, whatever I did, it meant something from a cosmic perspective. (0:28:16)

Now, in the modern world, we no longer believe in this cosmic drama. There is no drama. There is no director. There is no screenplay. Nothing. Which means, on the one hand, that everything we do has absolutely no meaning. If planet Earth explodes tomorrow morning with all the people on it, the universe won't care. On the other hand, because there is no great plan, no drama, so there is no limit on our power. The only limit on our power is our own knowledge or ignorance. If we have the knowledge, then we can completely change our place in the universe, the way we behave, everything. It's up to us to give meaning to the whole universe. (0:29:01)

And how will you do it? By looking inside yourself, connecting to your true self, connecting to your feelings, your emotions. Your feelings will give meaning not just to your own life, but to the entire universe. This is the basic message, the basic dogma of humanism, which have dominated the world for the last two or three centuries. The literal meaning of the word individual is something that cannot be divided. That I am an individual implies that my true self is a holistic entity rather than an assemblage of separate parts. (0:29:46)

However, over the last few decades, the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this literal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny. If you look really deep within yourself, the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is my true self. (0:30:13)

Humans aren't individuals. They are dividuals. Most traditional societies and religions indeed imagined that the way humans make decisions is because they have some spiritual essence called soul or spirit or whatever. And in the end, in some kind of magical way, with free will or whatever, this magical soul makes decisions. Now, over the last two centuries, the life sciences have been distancing themselves more and more from this traditional viewpoint. (0:30:54)

And you can summarize, I think, 150 years of biological research since Charles Darwin in three words. Organisms are algorithms. The way that all organisms, whether it's tomatoes or giraffes or homo sapiens, the way we make decisions is not because of some spiritual essence, but in an algorithmic way by biochemical reactions and calculations in our own body. I've never heard evolution described as an algorithm before, but it makes sense. (0:31:29)

Yeah, and I can give maybe a simple example of how it works. Otherwise, it sounds very complicated. Let's say that you're a baboon in the African savannah and you see not far from you there is a tree with bananas, but also there is a lion nearby. And this is a typical problem of survival that natural selection puts before organisms. In order to survive, you need to make the right decision to go for the bananas or not. (0:31:58)

This is basically a problem of calculating probabilities. What is the probability that I will starve to death if I don't eat the bananas versus the probability that I will be eaten by the lion if I try to get the bananas? (0:32:14)

So to survive and pass my genes on to the next generation, I need to calculate the probabilities correctly. How does the baboon calculate probabilities? Well, first I need a lot of data. Data about the bananas. How far are the bananas? How many bananas? Are they big or small, ripe or green? Then I need data about the lion. How far is the lion? Is it big or small? Is he awake or asleep? (0:32:41)

And I need a lot of information about myself. How fast I can run, how hungry I am, and things like that. Now you need to take all this data into account and quickly calculate the right probabilities. How does the baboon calculate the probabilities? Not with pen and paper or a pocket calculator. The entire body and nervous system and brain of the baboon is the calculator. (0:33:06)

What we call sensations and emotions are the way in which the baboon takes in all the data, makes the calculation, and reaches a conclusion. The conclusion of the calculation will not appear as a number. It will appear as what we call emotion. If the probability is positive, you should go for the bananas, then this will appear as the emotion of courage. The baboon will suddenly feel courageous and he will be puffed up and he will run for the bananas. (0:33:37)

And if the calculation is negative, then this will appear as the emotion fear. So what we call emotions are not some spiritual phenomena that comes from God or whatever. It's biochemical calculations. And yet, and I don't know what I'm reaching for here, but I'm reaching deep inside myself. And that's something people do. I mean, you look for the gut instinct. You try to find the honest, physical, almost physiological response. (0:34:07)

And I'm still stuck in a world where I want to cling to that and claim there is a self other than something that's just calculating how fast this self can run to get the banana. Well, most people cling to it, but most biologists say no, there is no self. Humans and other animals are just a collection of biochemical processes that basically calculate probabilities. (0:34:33)

And for me, what brought this home, what brought this revolution home was a children's movie I saw this year, a very good one by Disney. I think inside out. Did you see it by any chance? You know, for decades, Disney has been selling kids all over the world. This humanist fantasy that you are an individual and the right way to make decisions in life is getting touches with yourself. (0:34:59)

Listen to yourself, follow your heart, and everything will be okay. And this new film Inside Out, it tells about a girl called Riley, which moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, and she has a crisis. And then it looks what's happening inside her head. And you find out, and this is what Disney is telling the kids now, this girl Riley, she's just a robot. (0:35:21)

Inside her head, you have all these amazing biochemical mechanisms. It shows how dreams are being produced and how emotions are competing with one another. (0:35:32)

And there is no self inside. There is no inner voice that Riley needs to get in contact with. There are just biochemical mechanisms that produce all the decisions that Riley makes. And this is Disney. Okay, that's Disney. Let's make it Yuval. Is there a you in Yuval? I mean, you wake up every morning in Israel or when you're in a world tour like this, you have certain assignments. (0:36:01)

I'm assuming you go to the bathroom and you wash up. And then if you're at home, you probably go and teach. Here you get ready to go and do interviews with the likes of me. And you follow a daily routine, which is something that is repeatable. You repeat it. And ultimately you begin, I would assume, to treat that as something like, Oh, that's myself. That's what I do. That's what I am. (0:36:24)

What happens is that people construct a story about themselves and they become extremely attached to this story. They identify with this story and it basically controls their life. Now, this story, it's in truth, it's an illusion. It's a fantasy, but it is still a very, very powerful in the same way that entire human societies are being controlled by fictional stories about God and heaven and the nation and all that. (0:36:57)

So also each individual is actually not an individual. It's a collection of internal entities that are being controlled by this belief in a single overarching story, which is in truth fictional. Now, I do my best to really understand the reality about myself. So I spend two hours every day meditating. I meditate, Vipassana meditation, two hours every day to really understand, go beyond this fictional story and really look, what am I? (0:37:36)

What is the body? What is the mind? How are they interacting? And this is a very important part of my life. And one other thing that I would like to comment on this is that I'm not saying that what I just said about there is no self, everything is just biochemical calculations. This is not necessarily the truth. This is current scientific dogma. There is one thing that this theory so far fails to explain, and this is consciousness, the mind. We don't have any good theory that explains how the brain produces the mind. (0:38:16)

How come when billions of neurons in the brain fire electrical signals one to the other, how does this produce a subjective experience of love or hate or pain or joy? We have absolutely no idea. The scientists, they have kind of a dogma that somehow the neurons produce these experiences and maybe we'll have a good explanation in 20 years or 50 years, but at present we don't. Now, it doesn't mean that the old mythological stories of religions like Christianity about the soul, that they are right because science can't explain consciousness. (0:38:58)

I don't think we should go back. We should go forward. We should say, yes, we don't understand consciousness yet, so we need to keep on researching and to invest far more time and energy and money in investigating the mind and not just the brain and the body. (0:39:17)

In the early 21st century, the train of progress is again pulling out of the station and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms. (0:39:48)

These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles, and weapons. The main products of the 21st century will be bodies, brains, and minds. And the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens' Britain and the Mahadi's Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between sapiens and Neanderthals. In the 21st century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction while those left behind will face extinction. (0:40:32)

According to what you say in the book, we're all either going to become gods like Shiva or Yahweh or we're going to die. We'll disappear. Is it really that stark? I think given the current pace of technological development, it's very unlikely that human beings like you and me will continue to exist in, say, 200 years. We are one of the last generations of homo sapiens. (0:41:07)

Given the technological powers that we will have, either we will destroy ourselves or we will upgrade ourselves into something completely different. Now science is coming and saying we are not there yet, but we are getting closer. Death is no longer a kind of metaphysical decree. People have to die because God said so. No, death is a technical problem. And every technical problem, at least in principle, has a technical solution. (0:41:37)

So we are now working on the technical solution. And it's the same with upgrading humans. People dreamt about it for thousands of years. All the ancient mythologies are full of upgraded superhumans. But we never had the technology to actually do it. So it was all just imagination. It was all just fantasies. Now, for the first time, we are approaching the point when technology gives us the ability to realize our fantasies. (0:42:08)

But up till now, it was mostly the power to change reality outside, to change the world, to change the geography, the economy, the social system. But the world inside, inside our bodies, inside our brains, this hardly changed at all. We still have the same bodies, the same brains that we had 20,000 years ago. In the next century or two, we will direct our gaze from outside inwards and we'll start for the first time in history to really change our bodies and our brains and not just the economy or society. (0:42:46)

I was intrigued in the book. You seem to imply, in fact, suggest that that fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism is on its way out, that it's not something that will last. (0:42:57)

Again, it's like war and plague and pestilence. I look around and I see a lot of people who still believe in God and I don't see that trend necessarily. Yes, it's basically like in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. Most people still believe in God, not in the steam engine. But what changed the world was the steam engine, not God. And it's happening again. Now, given the tremendous changes we're facing already today in the world, you see a lot of people trying to cling to some eternal story like God or like the nation. (0:43:32)

But this is unlikely to really stop the change in the world or to shape the 21st century because these stories don't offer us answers to the big problems of the 21st century. The big problems of the 21st century are things like what to do when you can start designing babies with biotechnology, what to do when artificial intelligence is pushing humans out of the job market. (0:44:02)

And you have this massive useless class. What to do when humankind is being split into different biological costs. Now, you don't find answers to any of these questions in the Bible or in the Quran because the people who wrote these books back in ancient times did not know anything about artificial intelligence or about genetics. So it's obvious they don't have the answers there. (0:44:29)

If you need answers, you need to create new ideologies, new religions. And in the same way that in the 19th century we saw the creation of new ideologies like socialism and they really changed the world. So I think in the 21st century we'll again see the rise of new ideologies and new religions coming, not from the Middle East, but from places like Silicon Valley. And they will shape our world much more than the fanatics of the Islamic State. Can you be specific about what these new religions you talk about might look like or sound like or be like? (0:45:08)

Yes, the most important, I think at least at present, is dataism, a religion or ideology which worships data and not God and not humans. Basically, what dataism says is that given enough biometric data and given enough computing power, an external algorithm can understand me better than I understand myself. And once we have such an algorithm, authority will shift away from individual humans to these algorithms. (0:45:42)

So in the same way that authority at first was with the gods above the clouds, and then in modern times authority shifted below the clouds to human beings, now authority will shift again back to the clouds, but to the Google cloud, to the Microsoft cloud. This is where authority in the 21st century will reside. And all the important decisions will not be made by the Pope or by God. They will not be made by democratic elections and by individual consumers. (0:46:14)

They will be made by the algorithms in the cloud. Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future. (0:46:28)

But concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo Deus, a much superior human model. Homo Deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. Since intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, and since non-conscious intelligence is developing at breakneck speed, humans must actively upgrade their minds if they want to stay in the game. (0:47:03)

Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the entire universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not, indeed cannot, find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. (0:47:37)

Algorithms telling us what to do may sound like a half-baked notion straight out of second-rate science fiction, but Yuval Harari maintains that we're already getting closer to that reality. You actually give a musical example, and that's a computer program that was created that actually created a piece of music, and it was given to people to listen to. And they listened to it, they thought it was real music created by a human being. What does that tell you? (0:48:08)

Actually, maybe you can just do an exercise of just, you know, play the Bach and the EMI music and ask the listeners, what do you think was composed by Bach and which one was composed by a computer? We can do that. In fact, we can find the examples and play them. I think this will be amazing. Here's the background. (0:48:35)

The musicologist was David Cope, who was at the University of California. He'd invented a computer program called EMI, which could create music. Then somebody challenged this professor, OK, let's play the piece composed by your computer, and let's play real Bach, and we'll see if people will be able to tell the difference. So here we go. Can you tell the difference between a computer-generated piece of music and another one made by the real flesh-and-blood Johann Sebastian Bach? (0:49:08)

Here's one piece. And now here's the other. And the amazing thing is that most listeners thought that the real Bach was composed by a computer and that the computer piece was composed by Bach. For the record, the real Bach piece is this one. We are flooded with such examples, like just a few months ago, there was this famous match of Go. Go is like Chinese chess. (0:49:57)

It's much more complicated than chess. And most experts before the match were convinced that there is no way that the computer can beat a human champion at Go. And the artificial intelligence AlphaGo actually went on to defeat the human champion Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in a match in Seoul. But the really important thing is that Go experts then analyzed the way in which AlphaGo played. (0:50:27)

And they were amazed because nobody told AlphaGo how to play Go. They just told the AI what are the basic rules, what it can do and cannot do. (0:50:38)

And then they just left it to AlphaGo. It played, I don't know, millions of times against itself to train itself. And then it just went on to defeat the human world champion at Go. It gets worse or better depending on your perspective. You know how various websites like Amazon recommend future purchases for you based on the data the site collects from your past purchases. (0:51:06)

That kind of predictive algorithm is just in its infancy. If you read a book on Kindle, so as you read the book, the book reads you. Kindle knows which pages you read fast, which pages you read slow and where you stop reading. It gives you a lot of insight about your reading habits and what you like and dislike. Now, already today you can even upgrade Kindle with face recognition programs so it can basically monitor and analyze your facial expression and know if you're laughing, if you're crying, if you're bored, if you're angry. (0:51:44)

In 5-10 years, you can connect Kindle to biometric sensors inside your body and that constantly monitor your blood pressure, your sugar level, your testosterone level, everything. And then Kindle will know what is the exact emotional impact of every sentence you read in the book. Now, most of what you read, you forget very quickly after finishing the book. But Kindle, which means Amazon, will never forget anything. (0:52:13)

It will basically know who you are and how to press your emotional buttons. As I've said repeatedly throughout the conversation, this is a brave new world that I'm not sure I wanted to be part of. But it's interesting the way you've described it. I want to close by posing another question that comes from something you said earlier in the conversation. You said that we could have a choice between two kinds of cars that would be self-driving cars. (0:52:39)

So we wouldn't be driving them ourselves ultimately. But we could choose to have either a Toyota altruist or a Toyota egoist. Which one would Yuval drive? I don't like driving. So I really look forward to the moment when I can just give it to the algorithms to drive my car. Other things I like to keep to myself. I think that the key is to really get to know yourself better. (0:53:08)

I mean, if you want to compete against the algorithms, the question is, do you know yourself better than the algorithms know you? And so, you know, the oldest advice in the book, know yourself, is now becoming far more important than ever before. Because if you don't know yourself well, then you're very easy prey to these algorithms. Yuval, thank you very much. Thank you. (0:53:37)

彼に対する現在の評価​

上は既に 7年前の記事だが、7年前のこのインタビューが彼のピークだったと思える。文学でいえば、処女作/デビュー作 が当人の最高傑作…みたいな。

その後の彼はどんどん凡人化し、今の彼はまるで別人のようにも思える。

(2024-10-15)