Ban Fake Humans; Ban Algorithms that Spread Fear and Hate

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Information is not Truth

Yuval Noah Harari: “We Are on the Verge of Destroying Ourselves”
Amanpour and Company
Amanpour and Company
Sep 16, 2024 #amanpourpbs

In Yuval Noah Harari's new book "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI," the bestselling author and historian looks at the unique challenges that artificial intelligence represents for our time. Harari joins the show.

Originally aired on September 16, 2024



Transcript

in his new book Nexus a brief history of
information networks from the Stone Age
to AI bestselling author and historian
Yuval Noah Harari looks at how we got
here and what we need to do next in an
age where artificial intelligence poses
unique challenges and he's joining
Walter isacson now thank you and you Val
Noah Harari welcome back to the show
thank you it's good to be here again
your bestselling book sapiens was about
how we meaning our species Homo sapiens
became dominant and it's mainly about
how we were able to form networks of
cooperation your new book Nexus is about
Communications and how they help to form
those networks but it's rather
pessimistic I think you say the way
these networks are built predisposes us
to use that power unwisely tell me about
that theme well the basic question of
the book of Nexus is if humans are so
smart why are we so stupid we've named
our species Homo sapiens which means
Wise Wise humans and we know a lot more
than any other animal on the planet
we've reached the moon we can split the
atom we can decode and write DNA and
nevertheless we are on the verge of
destroying ourself and much of the e EOS
system um so this is the Paradox at at
the center of of of the book and of
course humans have been concerned with
this Paradox throughout history and many
mythologies and theologies they blamed
human nature that there is something
wrong with human nature which causes us
to be self self
self-destructive the book Nexus gives a
different answer the problem is not with
our nature it's with our information
if you give good people bad information
they make bad decisions they make
self-destructive decisions and we are
now seeing it all around us you know we
have the most sophisticated information
technology in history and at the same
time we are losing the ability to talk
with each other to listen to each other
you know there is maybe one thing that
Democrats and Republicans in the United
States can agree on is that the
Democratic conversation is breaking down
everybody accuses the the other side of
course but the basic fact is that um
this this ability which sustains
democracy to hold a reasonable
conversation it is breaking down at
exactly the same moment that we have
supposedly the best information
technology in history you say the flaws
aren't in our nature it's in our
Communications networks yes what are the
flaws in those communication networks?

The basic misunderstanding is about what
information does what information is
information isn't truth this naive view
which dominates in places like Silicon
Valley that you just need to flood the
world with more and more information and
as a result we will have more knowledge
and more wisdom this is simply not true
because most information is
junk the truth is a very rare and costly
kind of
information the basic function of
information in most cases is not to
reveal the truth the basic function is
to connect to connect large numbers of
people into networks and the easiest way
to connect large numbers of people is
not with the truth it with fictions and
Fantasies and mass delusions and what
should be done about that should
governments actually step in we're
watching that happen a bit um there two
things that should be done at the
governmental level and there is
something to be done on the individual
level on the governmental level the two
most obvious things to do is to ban fake
humans that uh we don't want algorithms
pretending to be be
humans uh and thereby distorting our
information systems if you go online
let's say to Twitter and you you see
that a story has a lot of traction a lot
of traffic and you think oh a lot of
humans are interested in this so I
should also get involved but actually
it's not humans it's Bots and algorithms
this should be banned so uh we shouldn't
have the situation when algorithms that
tend to be humans are running our
conversations the other thing is that
corporations should be liable for the
actions of their algorithms whenever you
talk about it with the big tech
companies they immediately raise the
flag of freedom of speech we don't want
to uh uh uh censor our users the problem
is not with the human users humans
produce enormous amount of content some
of it hate and greed but there is also a
lot of other good content the problem is
that the corporate algorithms of Twitter
and Facebook and Tik Tok and so forth
they
deliberately spread the hate and the
fear and the greed because this is good
for their business interests and this is
what they should be liable for for the
decisions and actions of their
algorithms not for the what the human
users are doing you've talked about uh
humans having some misinformation and
then you've talked about the way the
algorithms work is there a difference
between an organic uh information system
meaning human information system and an
inorganic
one yes there are many differences one
is that organic entities like us like
human beings we work in Cycles
there is day and night winter and summer
sometimes we are active sometimes we
need rest we need sleep the algorithms
are tireless they never need to rest
they are not organic and what we see in
the world now is that they increasingly
Force us to work according to their Pace
there is never any time to rest the news
Cycles is always on the mark are always
on the political game is always on and
if you force an organic entity to be on
all the time to be always active always
excited it eventually collapses and dies
and you know the most misunderstood and
abused word in the English language
today is the word
excited a lot of people mistake the word
excited for happy like they meet
somebody they say oh I'm so excited to
meet you or like you publish a new book
oh this is so exciting now excitement is
not always good excitement for an
organic being like a human being means
that your nervous system and your brain
are very engaged very active now if you
keep an organic system very excited all
the time it breaks down collapses and
eventually dies and this is what happens
now to democracy all over the world this
is what is happening to to humanity we
are far too excited we need time to rest
we need to kind of slow down and because
we give increasing control of the world
to
tireless nonorganic algorithms that
never need to rest and can just increase
the excitement all the time we are
breaking down we need more modom not
excitement in in politic in economics in
many fields when we talk about
artificial intelligence and we say how
it's going to change the way we
distribute information and either
Empower people or Empower uh
tyrannies sometimes people reflect back
on the last huge advance in information
uh technology spread which was Gutenberg
500 years ago doing the movable type
printing press you kind of debunk that
you say artificial intelligence is is
very Insidious compared to the pretty
good things that come out of the
printing press well there is a myth that
you know
Gutenberg broad print to Europe and as a
result we got the Scientific Revolution
and all the wonders of modern science
this is a very very inaccurate
misleading view of of History um almost
200 years passed from the invention of
print until the flowering of the
Scientific Revolution during these 200
years the main effects of print on
Europe was a wave of Wars of religion
and witch hunts and things like that
because the big best sellers of early
modern Europe were not Copernicus and
Galileo. Almost nobody read them
the big best sellers were religious
tracks and were uh witch hunting manuals
but it also was the Bible and that
helped take power away from the Roman
Catholic church and allow more
individual religion yes it certainly
broke the Monopoly of the Catholic
church but again not in favor of science
but in favor of more and more extreme
religious sects and you got again this
wave of the wars of religion in Europe
culminating in the 30 Years War which
was arguably the most destructive war in
European history at least until the two
World Wars of the 20th century uh for
the same reasons that that that we see
the spread of fake news and conspiracy
theories and so forth right now when you
make the production of information
easier what you get is not necessarily
facts what you get is a lot of junk
information a lot of fake news and
conspiracy theories and things like that
if you want the truth it's not enough to
have a technology of in to produce
information you need
institutions costly institutions that
make the effort to separate reliable
information which is rare kind of
information from the flood of unreliable
information and in in early modern
Europe it took 200 years to create such
Institution
like newspapers like scientific
associations you know in scient
scientific journals they don't run after
user
engagement the the algorithms today on
social media are exactly like the first
wave of Publishers in the 15th and 16th
century in the 16th century they also
ran after user engagement we want user
engagement and they discovered in the
16th century that if you produce a book
by Copernicus, with all these mathematical
calculations about the movement of the
planets nobody buys it. It's boring. But
if you publish a witch hunting manual
that tells you that there is a worldwide
conspiracy of witches led by Satan and
they have allies and cannibalism and and
and child sacrifice and they try to take
over the world and some of your
neighbors in the village they are part
of this conspiracy and these are a few
signs how you can identify these witches
in your town in your in in in your in
your village and kill them these were
the big bestsellers and this led to this
craze of the of the witch hunts which
was not a medieval phenomenon in
medieval Europe witch hunting was a very
rare I mean people didn't care so much
about witches in medieval Europe the
witch hunts were a modern phenomenon
ignited in part by the print Revolution
and by this flood of witch hunting
manuals which were good for user
engagement and very bad for everything
else

One of the things you say about
artificial intelligence that makes it
fundamentally different from every
previous uh part of the information
revolution is you say that artificial
intelligence AI are going to be
full-fledged members of our information
networks possessing their own agency in
other words they're going to have their
own will they're going to decide what
they want to do uh are they going to
have Consciousness are they going to
have planning are they going to have
free will

You don't need Consciousness
and feelings in order to have
goals and aims. When open AI developed
gp4, and they wanted to test what this
new AI can do, they gave it the task of
solving capture puzzles. It's these
puzzles you encounter online when you
try to access a website, and the website
needs to decide whether you're a human
or a robot. Now gp4 could not solve
the capture, but it accessed a website
task rabbit where you can hire people
online to do things for you. And it
wanted to hire a human worker to solve
the capture puzzle for it.

Now the human
got suspicious. It wrote to gp4 online uh
"what's happening? Why do you need
somebody to solve capture puzzles for
you. Are you a robot?" the human asked. "Are
you a robot?" And gp4 said, "No I'm not a
robot. I'm a human. But I have a vision
impairment, which is why I have
difficulty with these capture puzzles.
This is why I I want to hire you."
And the human was duped, and solved the
capture puzzle for gp4.

Now gp4 has no
consciousness. It has no feelings. It
didn't feel anxious when the human
kind of questioned it. It didn't feel
happy when it managed to fool the human.
It was given a goal, and it pursued this
goal by making up, for instance,
excuses that nobody told it what to do.

That's the kind of really amazing
and frightening thing about these
situations. When Facebook gave the
algorithm the aim of increased
user engagement, the managers of Facebook
did not anticipate that it will do it by
spreading hate-filled conspiracy theories.
This is something the algorithm
discovered by itself. The same with the
capture puzzle. And this is the big
problem we are facing with AI.

You
conclude Nexus your book with a
statement that the decisions we all make
in the coming years will determine
whether summoning this alien
intelligence meaning AI proves to be a
terminal error or the beginning of a
hopeful new chapter in the evolution of
life so I have that question what do you
mean by we I mean you said that it's
just in the hands of a very few people
uh how do we as uh people who don't run
Twitter Facebook uh how do we uh get
involved?

And it starts from voting for the right
people in elections that will rein in
the immense power of these Tech Giants
who are not elected by anybody, or not
really accountable to
anybody. And these crucial
decisions about shaping the future of
humanity need to be made by people who
represent the majority of us, and not
just by a few billionaires and
Engineers.

Secondly. it's choices we
each of us makes every day. The key thing
is to avoid the Trap of technological
determinism, the idea that once you
develop a certain technology, it can only
go one way, and there is nothing for us
to decide here.

It's never the case, every
technology can be used in a lot of of
different ways. You can use a knife to
murder somebody, or to save their life in
surgery. In the 20th century, we saw that
electricity and steam power and cars can
be used to create totalitarian
dictatorships or liberal democracies. The
same technology. This is also true in the
21st century. And with AI it has enormous
positive potential to create the best
Health Care Systems in history, to
help solve the climate crisis, and it can
also lead to the rise of dystopian
totalitarian regimes and new empires, and
ultimately even the destruction of human
civilization. And the choice which way it
will go, it's a choice that all of us
need to take part in.

Yuval Noah Harari, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you
[Music]

[admin]

Yuval Noah Harari
September 5, 2024

That's really AI. When it comes up with completely new ideas that we did not program into it, and that we did not anticipate. And this is a game-changer in history. It's bigger than the printing press, it's bigger than the atom bomb....

It was so unexpected. Like, you know, five years ago people said, "AI will master this or that, or that self-driving vehicles, but language, no. This is such a complicated problem. This is the human masterpiece: language. It will never master language." And Chat GPT came and it is -- you know, I am a words person, and I am simply amazed by the quality of the texts that these large language models produce. It's not perfect, but they really understand the semantic field of words. They can string words together, and sentences to form a coherent text. That's really remarkable. And as you said, I mean this is the basis of everything.

Like I give instructions to my bank with language. If AI can generate text, and audio, and image, then how do I communicate with the bank in a way which is not open to manipulation by an AI? That big question is, Why does the bank want me to call personally? To make sure that it's really me, and it's not somebody else telling the bank to "make this transfer to," I don't know, "the Cayman islands." It's really me.

How do you make sure? How do you build this trust, meaning --

The whole of finance for thousands of years, is just one question: trust. All these financial devices, money itself, is really just trust. It's not made from gold or silver or paper, or anything. It's how do you create trust between strangers? And therefore, most financial inventions, in the end, they are linguistic and symbolic inventions. You don't need some complicated physics. It's complicated symbolism. And now, AI might start creating new financial devices, and will master finance. Because it mastered language. And like you said, we now communicate with other people, our friends, all over the world.

You know, in the 2010s, there was a big battle between algorithms for human attention, which we were discussing before the podcast. How you we get the attention? But there is something even more powerful out there than attention. And that's intimacy. If you really want to influence people, intimacy is more powerful than attention.

"Intimacy" means there is someone that you have a long-term acquaintance with, that you know personally, that you trust, and to some extent, that you love, that you care about. And until today, it was utterly impossible to fake intimacy, and to mass produce intimacy. You know, dictators could mass produce attention. You know, once you have radio, you can tell all the people in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Union, "The great leader is giving a speech. Everybody must turn their radio on and listen." So you can mass produce attention, but this is not intimacy. You don't have intimacy with the great leader. Now, with AI, you can, for the first time in history, at least theoretically, mass produce intimacy with millions of bots maybe working for some government, faking intimate relationships with us, which will be hard to know that this is a bot, and not a human being...

There are of course also wonderful things that this technology can do for us. The ability of AI to hold a conversation, the ability to understand your emotions, it can potentially mean that we will have lots of AI teachers, and AI doctors, and AI therapists, that can give us better health care services, better education services than ever before. Instead of being in a class of 40 other kids, that the teacher is barely able to give attention to this particular child, and understand his or her specific needs, and his or her specific personality, you can have an AI tutor that is focused entirely on you. And that is able to give you a quality of education which is really unparalleled.

-- Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is a best-selling author, public intellectual and Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of multi-million bestseller books such as, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ and ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’.