Chris Anderson: Hello. So welcome to this TED dialogue.
It's the first of a series that's really going to be done
in response to the current political upheaval.
I don't know about you.
I've become quite concerned about the growing divisiveness in this country
and in the world.
No one's listening to each other. Right?
They aren't.
And it feels like we need
a different kind of conversation,
one that's based on, I don't know,
reason, listening, on understanding,
on a broader context.
That's at least what we're going to try
in these TED Dialogues starting today,
and we couldn't have anyone with us
who I'd be more excited to kick this off.
This is a mind right here that thinks
pretty much like no one else on the planet
I would say, because I'm serious.
I'm serious.
He synthesizes history
with underlying ideas in a way
that kind of takes your breath away.
So some of you will know this book,
"Sapiens."
Has anyone here read "Sapiens?"
(Applause)
I mean, I could not put it down.
The way that he tells the story of mankind
through big ideas that really make you think differently, though,
it's kind of amazing.
And here's the follow-up, which I think is being published in the U.S. next week.
Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, next week. CA: "Homo Deus."
Now this is the history of the next hundred years.
I've had a chance to read it.
It's extremely dramatic,
and I daresay for some people
quite alarming.
It's a must-read,
and honestly, we couldn't have someone better to help
make sense of what on Earth is happening in the world right now.
So a warm welcome, please, to Yuval Noah Harari.
(Applause)
It's great to be joined by our friends on Facebook and around the web.
Hello, Facebook.
And all of you, as I start asking questions of Yuval,
come up with your own questions,
and not necessarily about the political scandal du jour
but about the broader understanding of where are we heading?
You ready? Okay, we're going to go.
So here we are, Yuval, New York City,
2017, there's a new president in power,
and shockwaves rippling around the world.
What on Earth is happening?
YNH: I think the basic thing that happens
is that we have lost our story.
Humans think in stories,
and we try to make sense of the world
by telling stories,
and for the last few decades,
we had a very simple and very attractive story
about what's happening in the world,
and the story said that, oh, what's happening is
that the economy is being globalized,
politics is being liberalized,
and the combination of the two will create paradise on Earth,
and we just need to keep on globalizing the economy
and liberalizing the political system,
and everything will be wonderful.
And 2016 is the moment
when a very large segment,
even of the Western world,
stopped believing in this story.
For good or bad reasons doesn't matter.
People stopped believing in the story,
and when you don't have a story,
you don't understand what's happening.
CA: Part of you believes that that story was actually a very effective story.
It worked.
YNH: To some extent, yes.
According to some measurements,
we are now in the best time ever
for humankind.
Today, for the first time in history,
more people die from eating too much
than from eating too little,
which is an amazing achievement.
(Laughter)
Also for the first time in history,
more people die from old age
than from infectious diseases,
and violence is also down.
For the first time in history,
more people commit suicide
than are killed by crime and terrorism
and war put together.
Statistically, you are your own worst enemy.
At least, of all the people in the world,
you are most likely to be killed by yourself,
which is very good news
compared to the level of violence
that we saw in previous eras.
CA: But this process of connecting the world
ended up with a large group of people kind of feeling left out,
and they've reacted, and so we have this bombshell that's sort of ripping
through the whole system.
I mean, what do you make of what's happened?
It feels like the old way that people thought of politics,
the left-right divide, has been blown up and replaced.
How should we think of this?
YNH: Yeah, the old 20th century
political model of left versus right
is now largely irrelevant,
and the real divide today
is in global and national,
global or local.
And you see it again all over the world
that this is now the main struggle.
We probably need completely new political models
and completely new ways of thinking
about politics.
In essence what you can say
is that we now have global ecology,
we have a global economy,
but we have national politics,
and this doesn't work together.
This makes the political system ineffective
because it has no control over the forces that shape our life.
And you have basically two solutions
to this imbalance.
Either deglobalize the economy
and turn it back into a national economy,
or globalize the political system.
CA: So some, I guess many liberals out there
view Trump and his government
as kind of irredeemably bad,
just awful in every way.
Do you see any underlying
narrative or political philosophy in there
that is at least worth understanding.
How would you articulate that philosophy?
Is it just the philosophy of nationalism?
YNH: I think the underlying feeling or idea
is that the political system, something is broken there.
It doesn't empower
the ordinary person anymore.
It doesn't care so much about the ordinary person anymore,
and I think this diagnosis of the political disease is correct.
With regard to the answers, I am far less certain.
I think what we are seeing is the immediate human reaction:
if something doesn't work, let's go back.
And you see it all over the world,
that people, almost nobody in the political system today
has any future-oriented vision
of where humankind is going.
Almost everywhere, you see retrograde vision.
Let's make America great again,
like it was great, I don't know, in the '50s, in the '80s, sometime,
let's go back there.
And you go to Russia.
So a hundred years after Lenin,
Putin's vision for the future
is basically, ah, let's go back to the Tsarist empire.
And in Israel, where I come from,
the hottest political vision
of the present
is "let's build the temple again."
So let's go back 2,000 years backward.
So people are thinking sometime in the past we've lost it,
and sometimes in the past, it's like you've lost your way in the city,
and you say okay, let's go back to the point where I felt secure
and start again.
I don't think this can work,
but a lot of people, this is their gut instinct.
CA: But why couldn't it work?
America first is a very appealing slogan in many ways.
Patriotism is in many ways a very noble thing.
It's played a role in promoting
cooperation among large numbers of people.
Why couldn't you have a world
organized in country
all of which put themselves first?
YNH: For many centuries,
even thousands of years,
patriotism worked quite well.
Of course it led to wars an so forth,
but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad.
There are also many, many positive things about patriotism,
and the ability to have a large number of people
care about each other,
sympathize with one another,
and come together for collective action.
If you go back to the first nations,
so thousands of years ago,
the people who lived along the Yellow River in China,
it was many, many different tribes
and they all depended on the river
for survival and for prosperity,
but all of them also suffered
from periodical floods
and periodical droughts,
and no tribe could do anything about it
because each of them controlled just a tiny section of the river.
And then in a long and complicated process,
the tribes coalesced together
to form the Chinese nation,
which controlled the entire Yellow River
and had the ability
to bring hundreds of thousands of people together
to build dams and canals
and regulate the river
and prevent the worst floods and droughts
and raise the level of prosperity for everybody.
And this worked in many places around the world.
But in the 21st century,
technology is changing all that in a fundamental way.
We are now living, all people in the world are living
alongside the same cyber river,
and no single nation
can regulate this river by itself.
We are all living together in a single planet
which is threatened by our own actions,
and if you don't have some kind of global cooperation,
nationalism is just not on the right level
to tackle the problems
of whether it's climate change
or whether it's technological disruption.
CA: So it was a beautiful idea
in a world where most of the action,
most of the issues,
took place on national scale,
but your argument is that the issues that matter most today
no longer take place on a national scale but on a global scale.
YNH: Exactly. All of the major problems of the world today
are global in essence,
and they cannot be solved
unless through some kind of global cooperation.
It's not just climate change,
which is, like, the most obvious example people give.
I think more in terms of technological disruption.
If you think about, for example, artificial intelligence,
over the next 20, 30 years
pushing hundreds of millions of people out of the job market,
this is a problem on a global level.
It will disrupt the economy of all the countries,
and similarly if you think about, say, bioengineering
and people being afraid of conducting genetic engineering
research in humans,
it won't help if just a single country,
let's say the U.S.,
outlaws all genetic experiments in humans
but China or North Korea continues to do it.
So the U.S. cannot solve it by itself,
and very quickly, the pressure on the U.S.
to do the same will be immense
because we are talking about high-risk, high-gain technologies.
If somebody else is doing it,
I can't allow myself to remain behind.
The only way to have regulations,
effective regulations,
on things like genetic engineering,
is to have global regulations.
If you just have national regulations,
nobody would like to stay behind.
CA: So this is really interesting.
It seems that this might be one key
to provoking at least a constructive conversation
between the different sides here,
because I think everyone can agree that the start point
of a lot of the anger that's propelled us to where we are
is because of the legitimate concerns about job loss.
Work is gone, a traditional way of life
has gone, and it's no wonder that people are furious about that.
And in general, they have blamed globalism, global elites
for doing this to them without asking their permission,
and that seems like a legitimate complaint.
But what I hear you saying
is that, so a key question is, what is the real cause of job loss,
both now and going forward?
To the extent that it's about globalism,
then the right response, yes,
is to shut down borders
and keep people out
and change trade agreements and so forth.
But you're saying, I think,
that actually the bigger cause of job loss
is not going to be that at all.
It's going to originate in technological questions,
and we have no chance of solving that unless we operate as a connected world.
YNH: Yeah, I think that,
I don't know about the present,
but looking to the future,
it's not the Mexicans or Chinese
who will take the jobs from the people in Pennsylvania,
it's the robots and algorithms,
so unless you plan to build a big wall
on the border of California --
(Laughter) --
the wall on the border with Mexico is going to be very ineffective.
And I was struck when I watched the debates before the elections,
I was struck that certainly Trump did not even attempt
to frighten people by saying the robots will take your jobs.
Now even if it's not true, it doesn't matter.
It could have been an extremely effective way of frightening people
and galvanizing people. "The robots will take your jobs."
And nobody used that line.
And it made me afraid,
because it meant
that no matter what happens
in universities and laboratories,
and there there is already an intense debate about it,
but in the mainstream political system
and among the general public,
people are just unaware
that there could be an immense technological disruption,
not in 200 years,
but in 10, 20, 30 years,
and we have to do something about it now,
partly because most of what we teach
children today in school
or in college
is going to be completely irrelevant
to the job market of 2040, 2050.
So it's not something we'll need to think about in 2040.
We need to think today
what to teach the young people.
CA: Yeah, no, absolutely.
You've often written about moments in history
where humankind has
entered a new era kind of unintentionally.
Decisions have been made, technologies have been developed,
and suddenly the world has changed,
possibly in a way that's worse for everyone.
So one of the example you give in "Sapiens"
is just the whole agricultural revolution,
which for an actual person tilling the fields,
they just picked up a 12-hour backbreaking workday
instead of six hours in the jungle
and a much more interesting lifestyle.
So are we at another possible phase change here
where we kind of sleepwalk into a future that none of us actually wants?
YNH: Yes, very much so.
During the agricultural revolution,
what happened is that immense technological and economic revolution
empowered the human collective,
but when you look at actual individual lives,
the life of a tiny elite
became much better,
and the life of the majority of people
became considerably worse.
And this can happen again in the 21st century.
No doubt the new technologies will empower the human collective,
but we may end up again
with a tiny elite
ripping all the benefits,
taking all the fruits,
and the masses of the population
finding themselves worse
than they were before,
certainly much worse than this tiny elite.
CA: And those elites might not even be human elites.
They might be cyborgs or --
YNH: Yeah, they could be enhanced superhumans.
They could be cyborgs.
They could be completely nonorganic elites.
They could even be non-conscious algorithms.
What we see now in the world
is authority shifting away
from humans to algorithms.
More and more decisions
about personal lives, about economic matters,
about political matters,
is actually being taken by algorithms.
If you ask the bank for a loan,
chances are your fate is decided by an algorithm, not by a human being,
and the general impression is that
maybe homo sapiens just lost it.
The world is so complicated,
there is so much data,
things are changing so fast,
that this thing that evolved on the African savannah
tens of thousands of years ago
to cope with a particular environment,
a particular volume of information and data,
it just can't handle the realities of the 21st century,
and the only thing that may be able to handle it
is big data algorithms.
So no wonder that more and more authority is shifting from us
to the algorithms.
CA: So we're in New York City
for the first of a series of TED Dialogues
with Yuval Harari,
and there's a Facebook live audience out there.
We're excited to have you with us.
We're going to start coming to some of your questions
and questions of people in the room
in just a few minutes,
so have those coming.
Yuval, if you're going to make the argument
that we need to get past nationalism because of the coming
technological danger, in a way,
presented by so much of what's happening
so we've got to have a global conversation about this.
Trouble is, it's really hard to get people really believing that, I don't know,
AI really is an imminent threat, and so forth.
The things that people, some people at least,
care about much more immediately perhaps
is perhaps climate change,
perhaps other issues like refugees, nuclear weapons, and so forth.
Would you argue that
where we are right now
that somehow those issues
need to be dialed up?
You've talked about climate change,
but Trump has said he doesn't believe in that.
So in a way your most powerful argument,
you can't actually use to make this case.
YNH: Yeah, I think with climate change,
at first sight, it's quite surprising
that there is a very close correlation
between nationalism and climate change.
I mean, almost always the people who deny climate change are nationalists.
And at first sight, you think why?
What's the connection?
Why don't you have socialists denying climate change?
But then, when you think about it,
it's obvious.
Because nationalism has no solution to climate change,
if you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century,
you have to deny the problem.
If you accept the reality of the problem,
then you must accept that yes,
there is still room in the world
for patriotism,
there is still room in the world
for having special loyalties
and obligations towards your own people,
towards your own country.
I don't think anybody is really thinking of abolishing that.
But in order to confront climate change,
we need additional loyalties and commitments
to a level beyond the nation.
And that should not be impossible,
because people can have
several layers of loyalty.
You can be loyal to your family
and to your community
and to your nation,
so why can't you be also loyal
to humankind as a whole?
Of course, there are occasions where it becomes difficult,
what to put first,
but life is difficult. Handle it.
(Laughter)
CA: Okay, so I would love to get some questions from the audience here.
We've got a microphone here.
Speak into it, and Facebook, get them coming too.
Question: So one of the things
that has clearly made a huge difference
in this country and other countries
is the income distribution inequality,
the dramatic change in income distribution
in the U.S. from what it was 50 years ago
and around the world.
Is there anything that we can do to affect that,
because that gets at a lot of the underlying causes?
YNH: So far I haven't heard a very good idea
about what to do about it,
again partly because most ideas remain on the national level,
and the problem is global.
I mean, one idea that we hear quite a lot about now
is universal basic income,
but this is a problem.
I mean, I think it's a good part,
but it's a problematic idea because it's not clear what universal is
and it's not clear what basic is.
Most people when they speak about universal basic income,
they actually mean national basic income,
but the problem is global.
Let's say that you have an AI
and the 3D printers
taking away millions of jobs in Bangladesh
of all the people who make my shirts
and my shoes?
So what's going to happen?
The U.S. government will levy taxes
in Google and Apple in California
and use that to pay basic income to unemployed Bangladeshis?
If you believe that,
you can just as well believe that Santa Claus
will come and solve the problem.
So unless we have really universal
and not national basic income,
the deep problems
are not going to go away,
and also it's not clear what basic is,
because what are basic human needs?
A thousand years ago, just food and shelter is enough,
but today people will say education
is a basic human need.
It should be part of the package.
But how much?
Six years? Twelve years? PhD?
Similarly with health care,
let's say that in 20, 30, 40 years,
you'll have expensive treatments
that can extend human life
to 120, I don't know.
Will this be part
of the basket of basic income or not?
It's a very difficult problem,
because in a world
where people lose their ability to be employed,
the only thing they are going to get is this basic income.
So what's part of it
is a very, very difficult ethical question.
CA: And there's a bunch of questions on how the world affords it as well,
who pays.
There's a question here from Facebook from Lisa Larson.
How does nationalism in the U.S. now
compare to that between World War I and World War II
in the last century?
YNH: Well the good news,
with regard to the dangers of nationalism,
we are in a much better position
than a century ago.
A century ago, 1917,
Europeans were killing each other by the millions.
In 2016, with Brexit,
as far as I can remember,
a single person lost their life,
an MP who was murdered by some extremist,
just a single person.
I mean, if Brexit was about British independence,
this is the most peaceful war of independence in human history.
And let's say that Scotland will now choose to leave the U.K.,
after Brexit.
So in the 18th century,
if Scotland wanted, and the Scots wanted several times,
to break out of the control of London,
the reaction of the government in London was to send an army up north
to burn down Edinburgh
and massacre the highland tribes.
My guess is that if in 2018,
the Scots vote for independence,
the London government will not send an army up north
to burn down Edinburgh.
Very few people are now willing to kill or be killed
for Scottish or for British independence.
So for all the talk of the rise of nationalism
and going back to the 1930s,
to the 19th century,
in the West at least,
the power of national sentiments today
is far, far smaller
than it was a century ago.
CA: Although some people now, you hear publicly worrying
about whether that might be shifting,
that there could actually be outbreaks of violence in the U.S.
depending on how things turn out.
Should we be worried about that, or do you really think things have shifted?
YNH: No, we should be worried.
We should be aware of two things.
First of all, don't be hysterical.
We are not back in the First World War yet.
But on the other hand, don't be complacent.
We reached from 1917 to 2017
not by some divine miracle
but simply by human decisions,
and if we now start making the wrong decisions,
we could be back
in an analogous situation
to 1917 in a few years.
One of the things I know as a historian
is that you should never underestimate human stupidity.
(Laughter)
It's one of the most powerful forces in history
is human stupidity and human violence.
Humans do such crazy things
for no obvious reasons,
but again, at the same time,
another very powerful force in human history is human wisdom.
We have both.
CA: We have with us here moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt,
who I think has a question.
Jonathan Haidt: Thanks, Yuval.
So you seem to be a fan of global governance,
but when you look at the map of the world
from Transparency International,
which rates the level of corruption of political institutions,
it's a vast sea of red
with little bits of yellow here and there for those with good institutions.
So if we were to have some kind of global governance,
what makes you think that it would end up being more like Denmark
rather than more like Russia or Honduras,
and aren't there alternatives
such as we did with CFCs?
I mean, there are ways to solve global problems with national governments.
What would world government actually look like,
and why do you think it would work?
YNH: Well, I don't know how it would look like.
Nobody still has a model for that.
The main reason we need it
is because many of these issues
are lose-lose situations.
When you have a win-win situation
like trade, both sides can benefit from a trade agreement,
then this is something you can work out.
Without some kind of global government,
national governments each has an interest in doing it.
But when you have a lose-lose situation, like with climate change,
it's much more difficult
without some overarching authority, real authority.
Now, how to get there
and how would it look like,
I don't know.
And certainly there is no obvious reason
to think that it would look like Denmark,
or that it would be a democracy.
Most likely it wouldn't.
We don't have workable
democratic models
for a global government.
So maybe it would look more like ancient China
than like modern Denmark,
but still, given the dangers
that we are facing,
I think the imperative
of having some kind of real ability
to force through difficult decisions
on the global level
is more important
than almost anything else.