Yuval Noah Harari: commitment

Transcript context

…And you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians to have ever lived. Could be. I think our species, homo sapiens. I don’t think we’ll be around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse, by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control. But if we survive, we’ll probably have so much power that we will change ourselves using various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be homo sapiens like us. They will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals. So maybe they’ll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or homo sapien historians like me. I think it’s an extremely dangerous development. And the chances that this will go wrong, that people will use the new technologies trying to upgrade humans, but actually downgrading them, this is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and armies and ruthless politicians change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering, it’s very likely that they will try to enhance a few human qualities that they need, like intelligence and discipline, while neglecting what are potentially more important human qualities, like compassion, like artistic sensitivity, like spirituality … If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering and AI and brain computer interfaces, he’s likely to want to create a race of super soldiers who are much more intelligent and much more stronger and also much more disciplined and never rebel and march on Moscow against him. But he has no interest in making them more compassionate or more spiritual. So the end result could be a new type of humans, a downgraded humans, who are highly intelligent and disciplined, but have no compassion and no spiritual depth. And this is one … For me, this is the dystopia, the apocalypse. When people talk about the new technologies and they have this scenario of The Terminator, robots lying in the street shooting people, this is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that. What really worries me is using … The corporations, armies, politicians will use the new technologies to change us in a way which will destroy our humanity, or the best parts of our humanity. And one of those ways could be removing compassion. Another way that really worries me, for me is probably more likely, is a brave new world kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans, maybe it removes the diversity in humans, and makes us all kind of these dopamine chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment in the short term, which kind of seems like a good thing maybe in the short term, but it creates a society that doesn’t think, that doesn’t create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself at a more and more rapid pace, which seems like another kind of society that could be easily controlled by a centralized center of power. But the set of dystopias that we could arrive at through this if they’re allowing corporations to modify humans is vast, and we should be worried about that. It seems like humans are pretty good as we are. All the flaws, all of it together.…

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