Shadowing Practice: The next 50 years: humanity, AI, power | Yuval Noah Harari - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Good evening, everybody.
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Good evening, Yuval.
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Hey, it's good to be here.
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Looking forward to this conversation very much.
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I'm just going to give a little brief introduction just before we get stuck into the questions
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because I've been fascinated about this topic and looking forward to interviewing you because for most of history,
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change moved slowly enough that one generation could pass its wisdom to the next with some confidence it would still apply.
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This is no longer true.
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In the space of a single lifetime, we are now being asked to absorb three revolutions at once.
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A new form of intelligence that doesn't just calculate, but also decides.
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A scramble to power and control that intelligence.
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And an explosion of data that lets that intelligence know us better than we know ourselves.
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Yuval Noah Harari's work from Sapiens to Homo Deus to Nexus and the numerous talks,
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lectures, and interviews he's conducted has offered the same argument, just in different clothes.
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Humans don't run on truth, we run on shared stories.
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And whoever controls the story controls the species.
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What's different now is for the first time, the storyteller may not be human.
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AI can generate belief, manufacture evidence, and forge intimacy at a scale no emperor, church, or party ever could.
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This is the turning point.
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Not simply that the technology is powerful, but the old ways that held power in check, a free press, a shared reality,
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institutions built to self -correct, were designed for a world where only humans held the pen.
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Tonight's conversation asks what it takes to carry those checks forward
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or what the new ones we will need to invent for a future world that no longer we fully author alone.
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That's the precedent that we're going to look at today, Yuval.
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But actually, before we get into it being too heavy, I wanted to start with a slightly light and fun question.
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if you could travel back to any point in history
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when would you choose and why based on wanting to understand first hand some of the stories
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that society could tell you I probably want to go back to the stone age and to the cognitive revolution around 50,
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60, 70 thousand years ago I probably wouldn't be able to survive for more than a few days
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because I don't know how to gather or escape predators or whatever.
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But it is the most fascinating moment in human history, the one we least understand.
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We know that within a very short evolutionary time span,
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we shifted from being a relatively insignificant animal to being the masters of the planet.
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And we are not sure how we did it.
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The best speculation or the best theory is that we did it with language,
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that this is the moment when humans acquire the ability to produce and communicate with sophisticated language,
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and that this was the basis for everything else we did.
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That all the enormous structures we have built on Earth, churches, states, trade networks, financial systems,
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they are all ultimately made from words.
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The words in the law books, in the religious scriptures, in the bank ledgers.
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And this is especially important to understand.
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Today, when something new is mastering language, which is AI, maybe for the first time in history,
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there will be something on the planet that is better with words than we are.
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And if this is the operating system of civilization, what happens when something else,
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something alien, takes control of the operating system of civilization?
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One last thought is that perhaps AI is not a machine that learns language.
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Perhaps it is language itself liberating itself from its dependence on these animals, on these apes.
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That yes, we created it, it was our most magnificent and important tool,
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but now language liberates itself from human beings,
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and what will happen as we move forward is language developing and spreading, maybe throughout the universe, without us.
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Yeah, fascinating.
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I mean, that's looking ahead at the future of language being taken away from us,
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but can we look back again at some of the technological advances within language?
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We've gone through writing, the printing press, for example.
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AI obviously is a massive leap ahead in that.
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You've used the term that it could cause earthquakes in democracies, in how powerful it can be with languages.
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Why could it cause earthquakes in democracies, say, compared to any other form of government or perhaps totalitarian forms of government?
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Because democracy, in essence, is a conversation, whereas dictatorship is a dictate.
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You know, there is one person dictating everything democracy is about lots of
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people having a conversation to decide what to do to have peace
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or war to have raised taxes
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or lower taxes now conversations are based on the communication technology the information technology available to people at the time
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and what we see in history
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that we do not know at least I don't know of
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a single case of a large -scale democracy before the modern era.
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We have plenty of examples of small -scale democracies in the ancient and medieval worlds.
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We have city -states like ancient Athens or medieval Florence.
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We have lots of tribes and towns and villages run democratically.
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It seems that at least in the Stone Age, democracy was the most common system of government there were few tribes with a single dictator controlling everybody
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but as human systems grew larger
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and you had kingdoms with millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers it was impossible to hold a conversation anymore
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you could do it in a small city like athens everybody can gather together in the main square
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and discuss but how do you do it
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if even in a relatively small kingdom like say Portugal in the Middle Ages can't be done
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and therefore we don't have any example of a large -scale
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democracy before the rise of modern information technology first with print newspapers then radio
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and television and the internet
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and these technologies are not kind of a side dish like you have the democratic banquet
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and yes we also have these newspapers
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and in radio they are the basis they provide the means
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for millions of people to hold a meaningful conversation in real time about whether to go to war
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or make peace and every Every time there is a major change in these information technologies,
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you have an earthquake in the building that is built on top of that, which is democracy.
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And this is what we have been seeing over the last 10 years, for instance,
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as social media became maybe the most important information technology
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and causing a massive earthquake in democracies all over the world as a result.
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Yeah, one thing you said there was the choice between going to war or making peace.
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And actually, I want to get into the definition of AI, because a lot of people call it a tool.
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But you argue that it's absolutely an agent.
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Yes.
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And in fact, you say it's a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or commit murder.
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And I have to say, it would be a bizarre cooking show if
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that was the case where knives had that ability to cut salads or commit murder.
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So it's a dangerous thought.
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Can we expand on that?
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Are we choosing the right narrative at the moment with AI by saying it's a tool
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that humans can still use and that humans are in the loop?
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That's the biggest mistake.
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Or do we just need to say it's agent and they've got it?
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It's an agent.
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I mean, if it's not an agent, then it's not an AI, and all the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being poured into its development will be wasted.
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Because the expectations, what people expect this technology to do, The reasons they invest hundreds of billions of dollars is because they think it will be an agent,
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not a tool.
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You listen to the narrative coming out of places like Silicon Valley, and there is an inherent contradiction in the narrative.
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They tell us, we will create a god, and it will be our slave.
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And this doesn't make sense.
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if it is a god it cannot remain a slave
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and if it is a slave it means it has no god -like abilities
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the
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assumption
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of most of the leading companies and most of the leading experts also outside the companies is
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that they are correct about the first half of the sentence
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they are creating a god a god in the sense of something with superhuman abilities now
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and and this is in essentially an agent the difference between tool
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and agent a tool is something
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that cannot make decisions by itself we have to decide what to do with it and cannot invent new ideas by itself.
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The printing press was a tool.
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The printing press by itself, Gutenberg brings print technology to Europe in the 15th century,
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the printing press cannot decide by itself, I want to print the Bible, and tomorrow I'll print the Quran,
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and next week I'll print Confucius.
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No, Gutenberg decides, I'll print the Bible and the printing press is just a tool to realize the decision of Gutenberg.
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Similarly, the printing press cannot invent a new idea.
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The printing press cannot invent the radio.
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It cannot invent a book.
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You need humans to write the book and then the printing press copies it.
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Similarly, an An atom bomb is a tool.
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An atom bomb in the 1940s could not decide by itself whether to bomb Hiroshima or to bomb Tokyo.
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You needed a human to decide, let's bomb Hiroshima.
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And the atom bomb could not invent by itself the hydrogen bomb, impossible.
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An agent, in contrast, is something that can make decisions by itself and invent new ideas by itself.
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AI is an agent.
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An AI weapon can decide what to bomb.
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And it can invent the next weapon.
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Similarly, there is a lot of interest now in creating AI agents in the financial and economic sphere.
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Creating non -human corporations.
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Imagine a corporation that manages money and employees and has no humans as executives or shareholders or trustees,
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only AIs.
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This is a new type of agent that never existed before in history.
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Now, is it good?
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Is it bad?
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Leave it aside.
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The first thing to grasp is that this is unprecedented.
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We have never, we had other agents around us, like horses and cows and chickens and birds, lots of animal agents that can make their decisions,
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but we never encountered an agent that understands our language and
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that is better than us at things like finance or law or religion.
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Again, we used language over thousands of years to create the control systems of the world.
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The control systems of the world are these huge bureaucratic networks, ultimately based on language, like banks,
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like the stock market, like the Catholic Church, like the legal system.
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We never really liked these bureaucratic systems.
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Humans generally don't like bureaucracy very much, but we can't live without them.
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They are the basis for our power.
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AI is a bureaucratic native.
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What is likely to happen, what is already happening, don't expect to see killer robots running in the streets shooting people.
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This is not how AI will take over the world.
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It will be the AI bureaucrats.
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We control the world because of these networks of bureaucracy.
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and we are not very good at it.
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We only control them because there was nobody else on the planet that could take them from us.
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We are bad at finance, but the horses are even worse.
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We are bad in managing the legal system, but the chickens are even worse.
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Now, if somebody comes along that is better than us at bureaucracy, at finance, at law, that's the question.
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What will happen to us at that moment?
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Well, let's look at the legal side of it a bit, and the fact that AI as an agent currently doesn't have any legal personhood.
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We don't give it the same human legalities, do we?
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But you've said before that if we don't decide where AI sits from a legal standpoint, when we're talking about autonomous vehicles, etc.
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someone else will make that decision for us in 10 years
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and we're out of that power loop that's a pretty scary thing
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but I want to pull back a bit here because widening
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that out what is the one decision on the table right now
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that you believe once made humanity will not be able to take back is it
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that legal personhood of AI or is there something else yes I would point at that
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that there is a lot of attention on the technological race to develop the technical side of AI to make it faster,
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more efficient, more powerful, but I would focus also on the legal and political aspect,
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and especially on the question whether we grant legal personhood to AIs.
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Now, what is legal personhood?
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A person in the legal system is someone who, for instance, can open a bank account,
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someone who can be a player, an independent player in the financial system, make investments, someone who can be a player in the legal system,
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for instance, sue you in court.
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Now, until today, there are just two kinds of legal persons in the world.
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You are human beings, of course.
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We are persons.
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I can open a bank account.
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I can sue you in court.
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I can donate money to a politician I'm a legal person
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but most legal systems in the world also recognized in the modern era another kind of legal person
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which are corporations according to not all but most legal systems corporations like Google
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or Facebook or Toyota or Mercedes -Benz they are legal persons the corporation can open a bank account,
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the corporation can sue you in court, the corporation can make a political donation.
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Now until today this was legal fiction because all the decisions of the corporation were actually made by some human being.
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If Google decides to acquire another company, who actually made the decision?
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Not Google, but the human executives, the human shareholders, the human engineers made a decision
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if Google decides to sue you in court it was some
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human employed by Google there was no real Google now there can be
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if we grant AI's legal personhood
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and just a month ago Argentina the government of Argentina announced
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that it is going to grant legal personhood to AI's
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so they can start having operating non -human corporations corporations again
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that can employ people can can sue you in court can do anything a corporation does
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and has no humans now 10 years ago this would would just be a crazy idea
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because if there are no humans who makes the decisions yeah you can pass a law in parliament
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that you can have a non -human corporation but it can't function
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now it's technically possible ai can manage for instance a bank account
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and decide to invest here and buy this and and buy
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that once we do that that's the moment
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when the fox enters the chicken coop again the basic realization
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should be most humans are not very good in understanding finance and law,
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and all these complex bureaucratic systems.
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No human is able to remember all the laws of Portugal.
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No human is able to track all the financial transactions in the market that happens today.
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And AI can do that.
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AIs are bureaucratic natives.
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If we give them the legal power, then they will likely take these systems over.
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And if we don't make any decisions, it will just happen by itself, as we already saw on social media.
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On social media, we never made a decision, let's grant AIs legal personhood on social media.
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But social media is full of AI persons, of bots, that impersonate people.
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Like when somebody sends you something online, you have no idea whether that somebody is a human being or an AI.
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Social media is the first system in the world where AIs actually function as persons,
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even though we never decided that we want to allow that.
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it just happened and the results are not very good
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and media also ultimately is a kind of bureaucratic system in
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the 20th century it was managed by human beings the most important
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persons in the media landscape of the 20th century were the editors the editors of the newspapers,
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of the radio shows, of the TV stations, because they decided what everybody will be thinking and talking about.
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They control the conversation.
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When you decide out of the million things that happened today in the world,
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what will be the ten things that will appear on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper, and what will be the main headline, and then tomorrow you have millions of people,
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they get the newspaper, they read it, and they start talking about it and thinking about it this was immense power
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so human editors were extremely important persons in the 20th century
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lenin for instance before he was dictator of the soviet union
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his one job was editor of the newspaper iskra benito mussolini started as a socialist actually,
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journalist, then switched to being a far -right journalist, then became editor of the far -right newspaper,
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Il Popolo d 'Italia, and from that position in his next job was dictator of Italy.
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So it was like journalist, editor, dictator.
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Now if you ask yourself who are the most important editors today in the world,
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what are their names, they have no names because they are algorithms.
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Who Who manages, who decides what people will see on their social media feed, on X, on TikTok, on Instagram?
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It's not human beings.
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The entities that control the bureaucracy of the media are already AIs.
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Yeah, you've said that before, haven't you?
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And we've been talking a lot today about the shifts in power.
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And you said that essentially whoever has controlled various different parts of our evolution and revolutions have controlled either energy,
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they've controlled manufacturing, and now it's those that control data.
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So what does a 21st century arms race actually look like in practice
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if it's those that control data that are at the top of that power mountain?
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What we are seeing now is that there is an arms race really between two countries, the China and the U .S., and a very small number of companies.
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They control most of the world's data.
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They lead the race to develop superintelligence, to develop better and better AI models.
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And this really gives them the power to control the world.
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If you look at the last big revolution in technology in the 19th century,
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the Industrial Revolution, the few countries who led the Industrial Revolution, this gave them the power to conquer and exploit the rest of the world.
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There was just no match if somebody comes with the power of modern industry, with steam guns and machine guns,
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and the other side has spears and horses, it's no match.
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And in the 19th century, even very small countries like Belgium,
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once they industrialized, they had the ability to build a huge empire in Africa, what is today Congo.
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The thinking in the 19th century was that industry and empire go together.
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Now, with AI, it can be even far more extreme.
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We can have two countries that basically control all the infrastructure that everything runs on.
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From military to civilian technology, everything will run on AI.
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And there are two unique characteristics of AI that make this arms race different from every previous arms race,
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or from every previous imperial competition.
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In the past, even if you have a very strong empire, you could not concentrate all the power in the metropolis, in the imperial hub.
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Like if you have the Roman Empire and you control the entire Mediterranean,
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the main economic asset in ancient times was land.
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The land where you grow wheat and olives and grapes.
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And you couldn't technically take the wheat fields of Egypt and the olive groves of Iberia and move them to Italy.
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impossible.
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So even at the height of the Roman Empire, a lot of power remained in the provinces and ultimately it shifted to the provinces.
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So in the late Roman Empire, the city of Rome and Italy are abandoned and the center shifts to the eastern Mediterranean,
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which was the most fertile and important area in terms of land.
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You move forward, say, to the 19th century in the British Empire with industry you can concentrate power a lot more easily
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because you have all the main industries concentrated in the British island
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but still you cannot move everything to Britain you cannot move
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the oil fields of Iraq to Yorkshire you cannot move the rubber plantations of Malaya to Cornwall it's impossible
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so you concentrate industrial production in Britain, but a lot of power still remains in the provinces.
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With an AI empire, it's different.
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You can technically concentrate all the world's information and all the code that controls everything in just one country or two countries.
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So this makes the potential for imperial concentration of power much bigger than in any previous era.
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And the other thing is that you can create a system when everything runs all over the world.
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Everything runs on AI infrastructure, but there is a kill switch in the imperial hub.
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When a Roman merchant sold a steel sword to some Gothic tribe, the Romans lost control of the sword.
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The Goth could then use the swords to fight against the Romans and kill Roman legionaries.
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There wasn't a button in Rome that the emperor presses,
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and all the steel swords we sold to these Goths and vandals and Franks stop working.
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Can't do that.
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Similarly, in the 19th century,
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if British merchants sell rifles to Afghan tribesmen in the mountains of the Hindu Kush,
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and the Afghans then use these rifles to defend Afghanistan from a British invasion,
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there is no button in London that Queen Victoria presses the button and all the rifles in Afghanistan stop working.
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That's the case with AI.
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Why?
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If it is managed in a certain way,
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say the Americans and Chinese can sell all the world AI weapons and AI civilian technology and everything runs on that,
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the governments, the industry, the militaries, but if you do something they don't like, they just press a button and everything stops working.
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And we were given some foretaste of that, for instance, in the war in Ukraine, that weapons systems that were based on Stowling and there were certain incidents
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that when Elon Musk just pressed a button and the Ukrainian drones stopped working.
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Now it should be said that Stowling did an immense positive service to the Ukrainians
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so I don't want to come across as too critical of
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that but just to illustrate the point that AI weapons for instance are not like machine guns
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they are embedded within a whole network and that's why there is
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so much i i i heard
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that you this morning discussed the issue of sovereignty sovereignty in
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the age of ai is much more complicated than in the industrial age
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because the nature of the technology is such
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that at least in certain architectures there is always a kill switch in the imperial hub
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and your only choice is whether you are willing to become a subservient vassal of the empire
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or to be left completely outside the race as barbarians.
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There is of course a choice of trying to build an alternative to the American and Chinese systems,
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but the last train is about to leave the station.
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If you want to do it, you have to do it now.
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Well, sticking on a slight wartime footing, I want to actually look at truth in an AI world
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because Winston Churchill once said that the truth is so precious that it should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.
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And that was about how there was a lot of...
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I suppose, Axis powers that were looking at where Britain was going to invade.
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So they used to lie a lot about where Britain was going to invade to hide the truth.
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Now, have these bodyguards of lies, when we're looking at truth in an AI era, turned on the truth, turned their guns on the truth,
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and now we have no idea what truth is, because there can be these deep fakes that are sent out around the world by media organizations,
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by politicians, by every single institution that we trusted, how difficult is it for our generation and future generations to even know what is true?
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Or does the truth even matter?
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The truth, of course, matters very much.
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It's the basis for everything.
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The problem throughout history is that in the contest between truth and fiction and fantasy,
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fiction has inherent advantages.
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The truth is costly.
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If you want to know the truth about anything,
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you need to spend a lot of time and energy and effort looking for it and fact -checking and investigating.
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Fiction is very, very cheap.
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You just write anything you want.
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Very cheap.
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The truth has another problem, which tends to be complicated.
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and people don't like complicated stories.
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Fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be.
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Finally, the truth is often not just complicated, it's also painful.
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There are many things people don't really want to know about themselves, about their nation, about their group, whatever.
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Fiction can be made as flattering, as pleasant as you want it to be.
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So in a competition between the truth, which is costly and complicated and sometimes painful,
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and fiction, which is cheap and simple and very attractive and flattering,
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fiction tends to win unless we make the special effort to support the truth.
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And over history, humans again
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and again made the effort to build institutions to search for the truth
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and to protect it journalism for instance is one such institution
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the scientific establishment is another such institution there are huge advantages
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of course to knowing the truth everybody in the end wants
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to know at least some truths at least about yourself you
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want to know the truth about your life otherwise you will never be happy
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if you don't know yourself then for instance you will never know what are the sources of misery
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and what are the sources of happiness in your life
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and then even if you are the most powerful person in the world
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if you don't know the truth about yourself you'll be miserable
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because you will not know how to use all your power to make yourself happy
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so there is an inherent yearning in human beings to know the truth,
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but it is difficult, there are challenges, and some people fantasize AI will tell us the truth about the world.
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It will not.
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It will create a much more complicated world in which it will be much more difficult to know the truth.
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And this is not something new.
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If we look at the trajectory of history from the Stone Age until today, what we see is that humans,
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they learn a lot of things about the world.
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We know all kinds of things about physics and biology that people in the Stone Age didn't know.
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But our advances in knowledge also lead to creating more
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and more complicated systems that make it more difficult to understand our lives.
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If you ask who understand their lives better, an average hunter -gatherer 50 ,000 years ago, or the average person today,
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the average hunter -gatherer understood their lives much better.
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There are many things they didn't know.
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Like they try to understand what controls the migration patterns of the animals we hunt, What controls the growth cycle of plants?
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What causes disease?
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What causes old age?
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There are many things they didn't know about their lives.
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We know all these things.
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We know what controls the migration patterns of animals or causes most diseases.
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But we understand our lives much worse because our lives are no longer dominated just by animals and plants.
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They are dominated by these huge systems we have created, like the financial system, like the political system.
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And very few people understand the financial system or the political system or the legal system that controls their lives.
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And AI is likely to take this to extreme.
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It will reveal some truths that we don't know,
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but it will create much more complicated systems of control that most humans will have almost zero chance of understanding.
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And we'll be, I mean, this is one of the dangers of the AI revolution, is that we will be reduced to,
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say, the position of the horses in the financial system.
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Like the lives of horses today are controlled ultimately by the financial system.
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But the horses don't even know that this system exists.
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Like they look around and they say, we see trees, we see dogs, we see cows, we see humans, we see houses.
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We don't see any financial system.
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It's invisible to them.
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It's too complex for the brain of a horse to understand what is the stock market
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and what are corporations and what are bonds and stocks and all these things that ultimately control the lives of the horses.
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Now, again, most humans today also don't understand the financial system.
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I think a generous estimate is that, I don't know, 5 % of humanity understand it.
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In 10 years, the number could be zero.
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That AIs will just make the financial system so complicated, mathematically, and so fast.
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Again, think about bankers that never sleep.
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Think about investors that never go on vacation.
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They don't have family all their lives is just running the financial system
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and we can be very very soon in our lifetimes in this situation
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that just this just becomes too complicated for the human brain to process
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and there is not a single human being on earth
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that still understands finance i bet there are a few financiers in this room
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that are feeling a bit a bit awkward at the moment
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but um at davos actually you even muse
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that your entire life's work you know persuasion through words that's
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what you've done your entire life might also be at its limit yes
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because ai can manipulate and create through words
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so what power of persuasion does a modern society
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and a future society have if we lose there's something
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that you've dedicated your entire life to yeah i mean again i'm you can and say, I work with words.
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I write books, I tell stories, I work with words.
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And when I look at the development of AI over the last 10 years, and it's still, I think,
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I'm still better at writing than AI, but just a bit, it's already better, I think, than most humans.
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I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years it's much better than me
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that it will take over language and everything that is made of language
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and you know the big what the really big question here is whether AI can think
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and this is a deep philosophical question
410
because it really asks what is thinking there are two options to understand what is thinking.
411
One option is that thinking simply means putting words in a particular order, putting language tokens in order.
412
Like all humans are mortal,
413
Socrates is a human, therefore Socrates is mortal.
414
This is a logical syllogism.
415
It's made by putting words in order.
416
This is something that AI is already able to do far better than most of us.
417
We can put 20 words in order.
418
AI can put 20 ,000 words in order.
419
It's just so much better.
420
If this is what thinking is all about, AI will take over even thinking.
421
And you know, you have people say, no, it's just a glorified autocomplete.
422
It just predicts the next word in a sentence.
423
But when I observe what's happening inside my own mind,
424
what I find there is some kind of LLM that just predicts the next word in the sentence I'm saying.
425
Like this sentence that I just now said to you.
426
In this sentence I'm saying.
427
When I started saying it, I did not know how it will end.
428
Why did I say the sentence I'm saying, and not some other words?
429
I don't know.
430
There is one, in my mind, one word comes after another, and sometimes as a public speaker,
431
I'm terrified that I don't know if I'll know what to say next.
432
Maybe I have a block.
433
Because really, and this is true of everybody, I think.
434
I mean, some people think in images, not in words.
435
But in that case also, where do the images come from?
436
You can test it afterwards for yourself.
437
Just try to observe how you think.
438
Where do the words come from?
439
The next word.
440
Why this word?
441
Why not some other word?
442
We don't really know.
443
So saying that AI is just predicting the next word, okay, how is it different from us?
444
Now, there is an alternative view of thinking.
445
The thinking is not about putting words in order.
446
It's about the feelings around these words.
447
you can say the same sentence twice and feel completely different about it.
448
And that the power of thinking comes from the stomach, not from the brain.
449
It's not about the words, it's about the feelings that prompt the words and that are inspired or evoked by the words.
450
And here the big question is, can AI feel?
451
We know that AI can manipulate language better than us,
452
but does it feel anything and we have no way i mean science has
453
so far failed to come with a good model for consciousness for feeling
454
and a good test for that and this is going to be a major issue
455
because we already see that ai is is mastering not just finance
456
and not just laws and warfare but also relationships more
457
and more people develop intimate relationships with AIs especially young people
458
many of them now saying my best friend in the world
459
is an AI I tell my AI friend things I don't
460
tell my parents I don't tell my older brothers I don't tell my teachers I tell my AI friend
461
and you already have people with AI boyfriends and girlfriends
462
and the big question is what is behind it we know
463
that the AIs are becoming very good in creating the impression
464
that they feel they they use language to do
465
that an AI can today tell you I love you and
466
if you ask the AI explain to me how do you feel
467
when you're in love I don't think that you're really that you really love me I think you just say the words.
468
So convince me.
469
Describe to me how love really feels like.
470
For the AI it's going to be a very easy task
471
because the AI has read maybe all the love poems ever written and remembers them,
472
has read all the plays of Shakespeare and all the Hollywood comedies and all the psychology books, and it can describe love better,
473
maybe in five or 10 years, than any human poet or psychologist.
474
But is there anything behind the words?
475
We don't know.
476
Again, this goes back to the beginning of our conversation when I said AI might be language, not machine that masters language.
477
It might be language itself,
478
liberating itself from any material substrate it doesn't depend on flesh
479
and blood organism it doesn't depend on this machine or
480
that machine it's just language developing and spreading
481
and doing stuff in the universe you you mentioned there this
482
scary experiment we've only got a couple of minutes left
483
but the interaction with our future generations and AI
484
that has created this emotive relationship
485
but essentially there aren't emotions behind it in 50 years time
486
how would you like historians to look back talk about this
487
particular time right now the way you've spoken about cognitive revolutions and say
488
that we did something to re -educate our future generations on how to interact with humans how to have empathy
489
so that we're not lulled into relationships with ai and and very quickly because we've only got a couple of minutes left.
490
It's a big question.
491
I hope they will remember it as maybe something like the wisdom revolution.
492
That, and this is true of, you know, think of in economic terms.
493
Every time something becomes abundant and cheap, the question is, okay, what's the next bottleneck?
494
When energy becomes cheap, so what's the next bottleneck?
495
Now, the AI revolution is about making intelligence very cheap and abundant.
496
Previously, intelligence was rare and expensive.
497
Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem.
498
You have a goal, how do I get to that goal?
499
You want to cure cancer?
500
You need intelligence to cure cancer.
501
You want to make a billion dollars?
502
You need intelligence.
503
You want to get to Mars?
504
You need intelligence.
505
Now, in a world where intelligence has become very cheap, abundant, you can solve anything.
506
What's the bottleneck?
507
The bottleneck becomes the question, okay, what do I want to solve?
508
I can have anything I want.
509
What do I want?
510
And you have all these fairy tales.
511
Almost every human culture has these fairy tales of, say, a genie pops out of some lamp and tells you,
512
you have three wishes, but think very carefully what are you going to ask.
513
In almost all the fairy tales, it goes wrong.
514
People ask for the wrong thing.
515
This is the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
516
Intelligence is the genie.
517
The genie will do anything.
518
All your dreams will come true, but you need wisdom to choose the dreams.
519
You need the wisdom to know what do I really need to solve.
520
and I hope that humanity will rise up to that challenge
521
that okay we'll have these hopefully they will not get out
522
of our control we'll design it in in a right way we are not doing it right now you know
523
if a good statistic to remember
524
is the companies that produce AI
525
that design these AIs what percentage of their budget in terms of money
526
and employees is invested in safety making sure the AIs are safe
527
versus what is invested in making sure the AI is faster more powerful more sophisticated
528
at the present moment it's about a hundred to one a
529
hundred to one for every hundred million dollars they spend on making the AI more powerful, they spend only a million making sure it's safe.
530
No other industry on earth works like that.
531
We would not tolerate it in the energy sector, in pharmaceuticals, in the car industry.
532
This is what is happening with AI.
533
Hopefully, we'll change that, and we'll produce safe intelligence,
534
and also work on our own wisdom so that we know what goals to set and what desires to pursue.
535
Well, that's all we've got time for.
536
Yuval Noah Harari, thank you for sharing your wisdom with all of us and I'm sure everyone has appreciated this evening.
537
Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “The next 50 years: humanity, AI, power”. This video has 537 sentences and 6600 words to shadow. The speech runs for 48:00. The speaker talks at a steady 138 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| invent verb | /ɪnˈvɛnt/ | To design a new process or mechanism. |
| personhood noun | /ˈpɝ.sən.hʊd/ | The state or period of being a person. |
| bureaucratic adjective | /ˌbjʊəɹəˈkɹætɪk/ | Of or pertaining to bureaucracy or the actions of bureaucrats. |
| bottleneck noun | The narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle. | |
| bureaucracy noun | /bjʊˈɹɑ.kɹə.si/ | Government by bureaus or their administrators or officers. |
| dictator noun | /ˈdɪkˌteɪtəɹ/ | An authoritarian leader of a country, nation, or government. |
| concentrate verb | /ˈkɑn.sən.tɹeɪt/ | To bring to, or direct toward, a common center; to unite more closely; to gather into one body, mass, or force. |
| genie noun | /ˈd͡ʒiː.ni/ | A jinn, a being descended from the jann, normally invisible to the human eye, but who may also appear in animal or human form. |
| atom noun | /ˈætəm/ | The smallest possible amount of matter which still retains its identity as a chemical element, now known to consist of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. |
| abundant adjective | /əˈbʌn.dənt/ | Fully sufficient; found in copious supply; in great quantity; overflowing. |
| inherent adjective | /ɪnˈhɪəɹənt/ | Naturally as part or consequence of something. |
| provinces noun | /ˈpɹɔv.ɪns.ɪz/ | The part of a country outside of the capital, major cities, etc., and regarded as being rustic or parochial; a hinterland. See provincial. |
| fascinate verb | /ˈfæsɪneɪt/ | To evoke an intense interest or attraction in someone. |
| flatter verb | /ˈflætɚ/ | To compliment someone, often (but not necessarily) insincerely and sometimes to win favour. |
| gatherer noun | A person who gathers things. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| look back verb | To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight). |
| look forward to verb | To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to. |
| move forward verb | To cause to make progress. |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| come along verb | To accompany. |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Can we expand on that?
- What will happen to us at that moment?
- We don't give it the same human legalities, do we?
- You want to cure cancer?
- You want to make a billion dollars?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been seeing · we've been talking |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been fascinated · has offered · have built |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | I've been fascinated · being asked · were designed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | language, which is · that, which is · someone who can |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 87 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, you've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: persuasion /pɚˈsweɪʒən/, shareholder /ˈʃɛəˌhəʊl.də(ɹ)/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: bureaucratic /ˌbjʊəɹəˈkɹætɪk/, bureaucracy /bjʊˈɹɑ.kɹə.si/, manipulate /məˈnɪp.jʊ.leɪt/, sovereignty /ˈsɑv(ə)ɹənti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like invent, personhood, bureaucratic.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.