Yuval Noah Harari in conversation with Christine Lagarde at IMF
1) C: future is not necessarily for economists, for poets and philosopher
N: The best story-tellers of the world are economists, because they tell the stories that almost everyone believes.
2)C: Re long term uncertainty scenario planning. Some call you an alarmist and pessimists.
N: My job is not to forecast the future but to map out the possibilities. So many tend to focus on the positive scenarios esp in tech. Historians, philosophers and social critics are to counter balance.
No tech is ever deterministic. It depends on how people use it.
3)C: Info tech is not in and of itself, but together with bio tech.
N: The merger of two revolutions: info tech and bio tech. We are becoming the hackable animals - animals comes from biology; hackable from data. For ex, self-driving cars, w/o bio tech self-driving cars can't function. The cars need to understand human emotions and behaviors.
C: if you accumulate enough data, wouldn't you be able to anticipate?
N: Its not just the data on humans, but it's about human animals. You need to take in account how children, adults etc behave. It's critical to build models for each age groups.
C: Do you think there will be an AI doctor?
N: You are using sensor to monitor and analyze all the time, and then can catch the symptoms from the very beginning. The regular doctors can reinvent themselves. Identify patterns can be replace by AI. We will have AI doctors long before we have AI nurses. Human doctors are emotional. AI doctors are stable. People are obsessed with wanting to be understood. The danger is that AI can understand your personality so well that human will find other human who don't understand us the way that the computers do so intolerable.
C: Basic universal support instead of basic universal income
N: different approach. the key is "universal". Most people think in "national" terms. Some economy is the center of automation and will boom, but some will completely collapse.
C: that will require completely revamps of governing structure. will require new taxation mechanism and reallocation values based on empirical evidence (of who is suffering) to avoid chaos.
N: Yes, like industrial revolution in 19th century, but worse. Many countries fell behind. The danger then is exploitation. In the 21st century, it's worse than that. You will simply become irrelevant. When you are exploited, at least they need you...
C: Who owns the data owns the future.
N: Data is the most important resources in 21st century, just like land in ancient time and machines and factories in 19th and 20th centuries. Data are flowing to a few hot spots and the rest of the world is giving up the data for free. I don't have the solutions. Google (C) says they provide services, but is it under a fair price? Europe (C) is going through the more philosophical route of trying to govern the privacy and ownership issues. There are many models and theories to do it but what we lack are experiences. We are not sure what's the best way? We are working with a much shorter time-frame. The development of tech is going through an accelerating rate. We might not get a second chance if we got it wrong the first time.
C: you talked about economists being poets, writing stories many people believe, which brings the topic of truth.
N: Some of the best stories are not true, starting with Harry Potter. Religion (C)? We need to distinguish stories that are not true, with the ones that are harmful or not effective. To convince a lot of people to cooperate, you need to have them believe in a shared story. Sometimes the story is completely fictional, but it works, like football. It works until someone forgets that it is just a story. It goes all the way to the story of money. It is the best story ever told, because it's almost becoming the only story that people believe in. Money is really made of trust (C). In the beginning there is very little trust, so very little money. And money becomes more and more virtual because there is more and more trust.
Q's:
1)Q: Mindfulness, Bill Gates says it all boils down to being mindful and meditation.
N: Know thyself. Now you have competition of that. If machines know you better than yourself, they can sell you anything they want.
2)Q: What about nature? Does AI dominate that?
N: AI will not solve it for us, it will help. We need to give instructions. We need to realize that climate change is not only a problem but also an opportunity. You can't prevent the climate change by telling people to stop economic development, because economic growth is the number one value in the world. New eco-friendly innovations. Clean meat- grow a steak rather than inhuman way of growing cows.
3)Q: A new economic fiction?
N: The biggest story is economic growth. It's unlikely to change the story quickly enough. We need to work with the story, not against it. Maybe I'm wrong that you can make people realize that you can make people's live better not necessarily by providing more stuff, but it's going to be a very hard sell. Similarly, one other important story of money. Many attempts to create new kinds of money. Money is made of trust, not of distrust. If people think that the new money is made of distrusting the government and of distrusting institutions, it's going against thousand years of history. We could contemplating the taxation mechanism, taxing on information not money? I don't know. We do have to consider the possibility that the nature of money is going to change quite dramatically in the coming 50 years or so.
4)Q: DLT?
N: Very different way of thinking about ownership. Very promising but very little experience. Human has very clear understanding of owning land. One of the great difficulties is have people understand it. Very few people understand how financial system works nowadays. Maybe in a few years, no human understand how system works. More and more authority shifts to algorithms.
5)Q: Are there going to be more nations?
N: Brexit, only one person died. Far few people are willing to kill or to be killed for nationalism. All problems are global ones: nuclear war , climate change, and technological disruptions. None can be solved on a level of a single nation. Human stupidity is one of the most powerful forces in history.