The Greatest Threat Humans Just Can’t Stomach with Yuval Noah Harari

Rory Stewart (0:08)

Welcome back to Thinking the Unthinkable with me, Rory Stewart. Every week on this podcast, we talk about things that absolutely fascinate me. But they're often the stories of the week, an election in Germany, an earthquake, flood in Nepal, something that's happening in the British Parliament, a new prime minister. But there are other things that we don't talk about as much, which may be far, far more important and are much less visible. The things that could actually completely upend our societies, things that could destroy us. In this series, I'm going to try to go into the heart of some of those things. Some of them are things we used to talk about, but we don't talk about very much anymore, nuclear war. Some of them are things that we talk about, but we barely understand yet, AI. And some of it are things that we hear about, terrorism, ISIS, totalitarianism, but which we don't really understand the texture of, where I'm going to be sitting down with people who've actually lived on the ground in Mosul under ISIS, in Membij, Northeast Syria, as ISIS is coming up, talking about human nature, about totalitarianism, about extremism. And in all of this, I hope we're getting to the real core of what really in the end matters about politics, the really biggest things, the things that our minds struggle to predict, that our political systems, our newspapers struggle to really talk about, that voters aren't incentivized to raise, things which are unthinkable. And the question we'll be raising is, how do you think about the unthinkable?

My guest today is Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most famous public intellectuals alive today, the author of Sapiens. And today we're going to be asking perhaps the most fundamental question in existential risk. What happens if with AI we are building an alien intelligence that turns out to basically create a new form of empire, an empire in which AI is the emperor and we are the vassals? What's that going to mean for our economy? What's that going to mean for our politics? Ultimately, what's it going to mean for our minds and our sense of ourselves? And how can we learn from past civilizations on what happens when this incredible rupture occurs?

Yuval Noah Harari, can we sort of start with the general idea of this thinking the unthinkable? I don't know whether we want to call them existentialists, but what this category of things are and whether you recognize it as a category?

Yuval Noah Harari (2:43)

You know, the purpose of politics I think is all about is making choices, is defining challenges and problems that face society, giving the public two, three, five options.

And then we have a conversation about it and we need to choose what is the right policy. This is when politics functions well.

But for this to happen, the politicians need to focus on the most important problems that face society.

And every now and then, something happens in history, which is just outside the normal political discourse, that we don't think about it. We don't even have words to describe what it is, but it could be the most important next thing. And then the job of politicians is to think the unthinkable. You know, the range of examples from human history is quite wide. I mean, if you are in the Aztec Empire, and in the early 16th century, and you just have the reports about this very strange thing that happened on the coastline, these huge hills appeared over the ocean, and out of them came strange men or ghosts or demons. We are not sure what they are. And they have these huge creatures that can run, and they have sticks that can launch lightning and thunder. And this is the outside, the normal course of Aztec politics, but this is the most important thing you now need to confront. And the Aztecs did a very bad job confronting that. So they couldn't really understand what the hell is this, and what should we do about it?

Rory Stewart (4:30)

So it's a lovely place to start. So obviously, Yuval, you're describing the arrivals of the conquistador, the Spanish invaders into Latin America. And the astonishing thing there is that it's a few hundred people arriving into an empire of many millions. And despite the fact that they have horses and simple muskets.

Yuval Noah Harari (4:48)

That couldn't hit anything. I mean, it was just for show.

Rory Stewart (4:51)

In practice, it would have been very, very easy for a million people to over-

Yuval Noah Harari (4:55)

Yes, I mean, the tragedy in a way of the Aztec empire, they could have squashed Cortes very, very easily. But they didn't understand what they were facing. They made a lot of mistakes.