An interview with Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari (0:04)

The Economist.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:10)

Hi, I'm Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist and host of The Insider. It's a weekly video show for subscribers that you can watch on The Economist's app or online. Today, we're bringing The Insider to our podcast listeners. I want to give you the chance to hear some of the interviews I've been doing with the people shaping our world.

This one is with the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. He's the best-selling author of several books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and most recently Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. He's one of the most thoughtful people today on how AI could change not just the future of work, but the future of our civilization. He argues that whether AI helps us or destroys us is down to the choices we make right now. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's an important listen. So here it is for The Insider in full.

Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to The Insider.

Yuval Noah Harari (1:14)

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (1:16)

I've been so looking forward to this conversation.

Not only are you one of the world's most prominent public intellectuals, your books have sold millions of copies. And they've done so, I think, because you have a really remarkable ability to synthesize the broad sweep of history. But also, you are willing to make bold predictions about the future, which not every historian is willing to do. And that's where I wanted to focus today, the future, particularly the future in an AI world. It's something you've been writing about a lot. And you've called AI, I'm going to quote this, the biggest quote, psychological and social experiment in human history.

And I want to explore what this experiment will look like, what will it mean for our societies, our politics, indeed, our humanity. And I wanted to start with another conversation I had just a few weeks ago, which I don't know if you saw, but with Elon Musk.

Yuval Noah Harari (2:09)

Yeah, I watched that.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (2:11)

It was quite a conversation. But in it at the beginning, I asked him what the world would be like in 10 years time. And he made some very, I thought very, very striking points. First, he said, he thought that AI will have far surpassed human intelligence.

Secondly, that it would be a world of superabundance. And thirdly, it was unlikely humans would be in control. Do you share that vision?

Yuval Noah Harari (2:37)

I generally agree with the first and third predictions, that it's very likely, given current trajectories, that AI will be more intelligent than us in 10 years, and therefore will be in control. I disagree that this is inevitable.

I mean, you hear a lot that this is inevitable from people who are leading this revolution, because this basically relieves them of our responsibility.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (3:02)

So you disagree it will be inevitable that they will be more intelligent than us or inevitable that they will be in control?

Yuval Noah Harari (3:06)

If we continue with the present accelerating pace of the AI race, yes, this will be the result. In 10 years, the AIs will take over. But this is not inevitable. We are still in control in 2026, and it's our decision what to do now, and that's crucial. And what really struck me about the conversation you had with Elon Musk is the kind of contradiction between, and you pointed it out in real time, the contradiction between the two parts of the conversation, because he says in 10 years, AI will take over the world, and then he worries so much about Muslim immigration causing civil war in Britain in 20 years. This doesn't make sense.

If the AIs take over the planet in 10 years, why do you care so much about things that will have an effect when we have no idea what the planet will be like? Similarly, he gave another prediction, I think equally important that money will disappear in 10 years. There won't be money, no human money in 10 years. And I think he is correct, because the AIs will take over the financial system. It will be an AI financial system controlling the world. The same way that today, the human financial system controls the lives of cows and chickens, but the cows and chickens have no idea that finance even exists.

This is likely to be our position in 10 years. And he said it quite clearly, there won't be money, at least not money that we understand in 10 years. And then he cuts USAID to Africa because he wants to save money.