How Humans Took Over the World with Yuval Noah Harari 

I like Adam's interview style and how he's not afraid to push back against the interviewee's claims but also keeps the tone conversational and friendly

I love how when Adam was doing his ads, he slipped in plenty of "they claim" and "according to them", because, like, everyone needs to make money to keep the lights on, but he's not just gonna peddle bullshit without making damn sure we can smell it from a mile off.

I love that you're getting more active on RU-vid, Adam! I lost my Cable a while back and couldn't keep up on ARE so I'm happy to see you here! I wish it was under better circumstances.

Adam is schooling dude. Thank you for allowing us to witness this.

This guy who's quote got on Harari's wiki encapsulates this interview perfectly: His work has been more negatively received in academic circles, with Christopher Robert Hallpike stating 2020 in a review of Sapiens that: "one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously." Hallpike further states that: "we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria, it is a most successful book." Dude has no idea what he's talking about. Imagine being a historian without understanding basic economics. He's a public speaker, not a scientist. Adam needs better interviewees.

DUDE- THANK YOU for the framing of this interview! I dont need 'Crossfire' or 'Hardball', but thoughtful and critically reasoned discussion is SO IMPORTANT, and so missing from our social discourse. More of this, please.

Gotta agree with Adam about the AI not being significantly different from other tools we've invented in the past. What's the quote? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we treat AI with this mysticism, we release ourselves from the responsibility of understanding it and the responsibility for whatever results from its use and THAT's the dangerous part.

Can we applaud the subtle “allegedly” Adam squeezed into his sponsor? Just amazing.

Coming back here after the relistening to the interview you did with David Wengrow, I couldn't help but notice how Harare answers the questions in a very non-commital way, trying to walk around them, while Wengrow answers them directly. I could especially notice it in the difference between how they tackled the AI question, despite Harare claiming he doesn't see things in a deterministic way, and that AI is an objective and fully automated being, he doesn't take a step back and consider that AI is designed and made for a specific purpose and within specific parameters, he seems to think that AI deployed by the military or a self driving car would make objective best decisions given the situation, and not cut corners like you'd expect a product to do. It comes up the most in the discussion about potential racial biases in it, where he doesn't consider that there are still people behind the AI that guided it the design process.

I understand the anti victimhood sentiment to a degree, but it's important to note that in the specific given case of climate change and systemic inequality, that very same anti-victimhood sentiment is a weapon used by those in power to shift the onus to the powerless masses. It's good to do your part, but it is true in this case that your part doesn't even make a microscopic dent in the issue, even if we as a society somehow all agree to do our small part. I'd rather see people protesting, educating others, trying to take direct action inside their governing bodies t enact change, than giving in to the big companies' propaganda of personal carbon footprints, charity events, cute "plant a tree" gimmicks and so on. These things more often than not only make you feel good about yourself.

I’m actually 3/4 of the way through this book right now so I immediately clicked and loved this entire conversation ALSO I had no idea you had a podcast and ALSO ALSO I had no idea you have a RU-vid channel so today is a VERY GOOD DAY

"The tech elite loves him" That's the reddest flag of them all.

Adam is 100% correct pushing back against this narrative that AI and Machine Learning are currently and will inevitably do all these very complicated actions, our current machine learning paradigms require ALOT of data for example applications like Watson or DALLE to perform the image processing they require 100s of Terabytes to 10s of Petabytes of data and months of training to produce sort of reasonable approximations of art prompts or identify some forms of cancer from medical scans. What these people that are drawing this picture of AI as the future of all technology fail to address is that the absolute volume of information required for AI to do a single task at the same level a single human is Billions to Trillions of times the same information a single human being needs to ingest in order to do the same task. That's not to say there isn't benefit to the fact that once a machine learning program has trained its algorithm that the application is then able to seemingly perform a very narrow purpose task on what feels like an instantaneous time scale, but to train that program to do something slightly different requires copious amounts of data, tweaks to the data set, tweaks to the learning parameters and hours, days, weeks or even months of retraining. Due to this Adam is right, at this current point in time unless you give the application millions, billions or in cases like DALLE trillions of data points the algorithm performance will be mediocre, a lot recommendation algorithms are only fed 100s to 1000s of inputs resulting just insufficient data to reliably serve content that users actually want to see, when it works its fine but its definitely an illusion that these algorithms are good, I honestly think there is a survivorship bias where most people only remember the moderate number of times that the algorithms have worked but not the great many times the recommendations have been bad. The Netflix algorithm is a great example of this as a Netflix power user who always rates everything, clears out my continue watching when I don't like something and set reminders from coming soon, the recommended for me section never has anything I actually want to watch in it, and I often find myself searching specific categories. I especially hate the RU-vid algorithm, it only requires you to watch a couple videos that you aren't sure of to try them out for it to famously start recommending a wave of crap that you don't want to see, its so common that video essayists joke about it anytime they are doing on a topic or group they don't agree with. There is simply not enough data generated by an individual to correctly identify with perfect confidence what they will want to do, so very often these algorithms rely on using predications made at more generic population levels often being affected by biases in the larger set of training data resulting in issues such as facial recognition algorithms not being able to identify black people. Many of Yuval's examples around social media are not strictly machine learning examples, software applications have been able to process and analyze large volumes of information for a long time using classical algorithms. If a autocrat or dictator wants to monitor its population for possible dissention it machine learning wouldn't be necessary to be used to troll social media for possible signs of dissention, its currently much easier to write a classical algorithm to look for specific words and phrases related to activities that are deemed unsafe or dangerous than it would be to program an AI to do that. Where the AI would be useful is to narrow down the list of possible matches and use the context to eliminate false positives and give dissenters a confidence of how likely they are to actually dissent, the actual identification, analysis and grouping doesn't require any machine learning. Also I find it very annoying when people state that "Machine learning algorithms are black boxes", the simple answer is no they aren't. The people who have developed neural nets, genetic algorithms, tensor flow, etc. know exactly how the machine learning portion of the algorithms work, and the people writing the applications are setting the targets, the parameters, selecting the data, writing the positive and negative cases, the only thing that is a black box is what is actually written by the applications. We as developers set the conditions, its not like we are hatching these programs out of an egg and we have to use positive re-enforcement training to ensure that our robot doesn't pee on the carpet. Also analysis can be done on the resultant software that is created by the algorithms, its just that machines don't write code in a way that is directly human readable with nice comments and best practice variable names, but its not impossible to decompile an application written by an AI application and step through and analyze what its doing, its just time consuming, expensive and the applications need to be fully retrained to take advantage of the machine learning algorithms when faults are found so there is no point in analyzing the output if its just going to be retrained. Everything is human readable with enough time, even machine derived applications. As a software developer who has worked at companies where the executive teams have shifted to try to incorporate AI into products that don't need it or recreate our existing products, "but now powered by AI" I find nearly the entire conversation around machine learning to be unnecessary fluff, and widely blown out of proportion. I am not saying that the technology isn't something to be worried about, but Adam is 100% the issues are the people making the technologies and the law makers that have failed to pass laws to regulate what things software algorithms can do in general. The problem isn't going to be run away AI applications it is, will be and always has been greedy people writing software for nefarious purposes.

Great interview and well worth the watch. As many others have commented, Adam's interview style is exactly what we need to have some sorely needed thoughtful discourse. If we are to enact any meaningful change, we must begin by talking about it. And by watching Adam kill it on RU-vid.

I'm glad Adam's becoming more active on his channel

I loved how they debated and got to share opinions and agreeing and disagreeing. Powerful. Please do more! Invite me for some as well, haha

Dude, where does all you energy come from? Thanks for creating this quality content by the way!

No need to speed up the playback on any of Adam's vids. He talks fast enough to keep my mind from straying. Nuerodivergents rock!

These kind of conversations are very important. Keep it up Adam.

Clicked this as soon as I saw it so I could come to this comments section and shit on Yuval Noah Harari for writing a bad book in which he peddles a grand narrative of pre-history based on outdated paleoanthropology from behind his history and philosophy degrees after being inspired by Guns, Germs, and Steel, another bad book that peddles a grand narrative of history based on patently false information about history and geography... so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Adam intended to talk to him about scholarly criticisms of Sapiens, and listened through. Ended up deeply disappointed that the only criticism he brought up was the point about the Agricultural Revolution not being a single event. Sapiens has gotten little praise from Anthropologists in general, because most of what it says is old - which is perfectly acceptable in some cases, but in other cases makes it wildly outdated, such as Harari's commitment to an idea of a "cognitive revolution" which was proposed based on minimal evidence and is rejected by most modern Anthropologists - and that which isn't tends to be incorrect. It's full of unsourced claims and questionable points, and much like the book that inspired it, its popularity has probably done more harm than good for the public understanding of the field it focuses on. I get why Adam didn't have the background information to criticize the book beyond what he heard from Wengrow, but I am a little annoyed to see Harari being positioned as an "expert" on things outside of his actual fields of study. I mean, it was still an interesting talk, I don't regret listening... but God I hate any credence being given to that book.

I laughed out loud when he said "eventually we found a way to harness the industrial revolution for the benefit of all, not just the wealthy few." What world is this guy living in? Wealth inequality is higher than ever before. And of course a guy who views the world that way equated fascism and communism.

What a fantastic episode! Thank you Adam.

43:36 This is a great point. If we had a benevolent society then we wouldn't have people fearing information getting out that will just be used to exploit or harm them. Human health and society would benefit if the medical system had our genes available to study. But we're worried about employer discrimination and corporate usury. Psychological profiles from data collected from our digital footprint could help us recognize issues about our lives, individually and as societies, but it's mostly used to steal from us, and institutions that should be helping us we have reason to fear persecution.

Something that I think should be noted in this conversation from Harari is the common trap of techno-mysticism surrounding AI and its present uses. By palming off bad outcomes from the AI to a lack of knowledge about how it is thinking, it abdicates the designers from any responsibility for the outcomes of their creation. The reality of these algorithms are they are just that, algorithms. You can change out and control the parameters as the designer. As an example, just look at RU-vid and how it's recommendation algorithm is often changed, and often without even telling the content producers until they've already noticed the outcomes. His original position that humans can do anything really does seem to conflict with how he views AI, and the feeling that I get from it is that he has largely fallen into the trap that tech-bros have of removing the human from the equation.

Some of this guy's ideas about human evolution and early homo sapiens' prehistory are a little bit out imo. In my opinion he's a out of tune with evolutionary psychology's more recent discussions around human cognition and social development. I feel like he kinda trying to be a big synthesising modernist philosopher, but like many people who have tried to do that, they end up drawing a big line of best fit through history while drawing over some very important details to construct a broad and constant narrative. I can see why tech/engineer type people love him so much! I think a lot of his philosophy is actually very empowering (we have the answers, we can change society, etc), and his history constantly works around a series of mostly technological problems as an engineer would. I'm glad he's introducing people to some of these historical discussions though. Also Adam asked some really good questions so nice job.

I love Harari. I really acknowledge you Adam for your interview style and the quality of your questions.

I've read Sapiens 4 times so far. I learn more every time. Really great interview!

The value of this interview is watching Yuval squirm after Adam's gentle pushback. "The solution to AI is more AI!" I get the feeling that academics criticize this guy because he's cosplaying as an academic. He may be well educated but he is primarily concerned with selling his children's book and rubbing elbows with tech billionaires.

When he says we can solve the climate crisis, what he’s really doing is reminding us that we’re collectively permitting the system to cause the crisis and we are responsible. This seems like such an obvious point to me, yet the need to make it shows how much we’re guilty of accepting this insane system

Great guest and discussion

4:25 Not promising. Chocolate was not domesticated by the Olmecs. It was domesticated in what is now Ecuador thousands of years earlier.

It's honestly a surprise to see how much Adam uses his hands when he speaks. I'm glad I started watching instead of just listening.

You rock, Adam. Great to see new stuff

Great interview. There were times when I agreed with Yuval more and Adam more. The environment that allows the audience to do that is the best for learning!

I really really like you Adam! This was awesome and terrifying ! Thankyou👍🏼🌎💙

Loving these youtube videos, Adam!

Hearing intelligent ideas today is like a vacation for the mind. Thank you. We are just inundated by bullshit and hatred.

I'd love to see Adam interview Shoshana Zuboff to round out the questions raised in this conversation.

When Great minds come together

"both our minds will be blown, and we're going to have fun doing it" . I don't think it gets more honest than that. Carry on. Ohhhhh, you're Adam. I thought you sounded familiar. I'm ready to go down the rabbit hole with you. It's going to take a toll on my brain, but you're doing all the work. I just have have to listen. That's fair.

This is an UNBELIEVABLE crossover! I’m so happy that you interviewed professor Harari. Great work! 💯

Thank you, Yuval Noah Harari and Adam.

I get why the tech-bros like him. He says a lot of smart-sounding, plausible-seeming things. Of course, those fall completely apart once you think about them for a second. But if you're self-satisfied and lazy, his basic (and often skewed or plain wrong) analogies and simple messages will make you feel smart and very inspired.

"Creativity is our most precious resource. The supply is limitless. The more we use, the more we have."

Teach Yuval, “we don’t even have the conceptual tools to understand” the power of machine learning. This is why he is urging humans to THINK deeply before we rush into new innovations.

a truly intelligent conversation with heartfelt ambitions

These new youtube videos have been awesome!

i'm so engaged in this content

Twice I thought I heard Adam present Yuval as "you all know Harari" and mentally responded with "no I don't".

The Small Business Administration sure is putting out some interesting content these days.

I had no idea he had this podcast lol and there are tons of episodes already, damn.

MOAR ADAM!

Would love to see Adam moderate a debate on Factually

Becoming what you worshiping is worshiping what you become

It's cute watching Adam talk to someone who he looks up to so much

Regarding climate change, it becomes pertinent to point out that the reason it's devilishly intractable is that it requires cooperation on a scale we have never operated on. I mean, absent a shift in collective consciousness, no matter how many techno fixes we come up with, we are perpetually stuck in a zero-sum game world.

Is this the algorithm? I literally just started reading “Sapiens” and this pops up 😆 don’t hate it

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I am Thankful for Spatulas.

JUST GOT ME SO EXCITED WITH THE INTRO OMG HAHAHA ok... watching now

this man is a miracle to the children of the future.........thank god

Amazing interview! Excellent discussion and some really powerful ideas

One of my favourite thinkers being interviewed by my favourite questioner. Obviously he releases it when I'm super tired and heading to bed...*turns kettle on for a coffee*

This is sooooo interesting. Thank you for this video. the victimized mentality point kinda worries me though. I try to not get into that mindset, but it's kinda difficult when you are victimized repeatedly, and the colonizers have no remorse? Tell white Americans, Spaniards, Russians and Japanese to 'stop the victimhood mentality' because they have caused the rest of us to be displaced. But to say that of the rest of us has 'stop being poor' vibes. How?! Can you do a ruin green powders, like AG1 or even your sponsor, K'Chava? Do those things really work?

Thank u for having a cogent informative interview. These r the things I remember used to happen on PBS when I was a kid in the 70s. U do a public service. Airway liked your old show too ..thank u.

Hmmm, that is a question I have never even considered. Thanks

This is my new favourite channel

Adam ROCKS, I'll always watch his shit.

Most religions have prophecies about world peace and it usually comes after all of their enemies lose and submit to their rule

I'm happy to see you on RU-vid:)

Adam is pretty damn good. I dont seeing an Adam algorithm, lasting for a few centuries.

I would argue that we certainly have not "figured it out" concerning the industrial revolution. We may have some good things like better treatment for diseases etc but the vast majority of people have less leisure time, are less connected with their loved ones (despite what social media claims), and face more environmental threats that are outside the scope of their personal power than ever before, because of the continuing consolidation of power into corporations. If we are barreling towards an irreversible negative global environmental outcome that can be proven with data and we still fail to convince (or force) the largest contributors to those threats to alter course- we haven't figured out anything valuable whatsoever. None of the positives matter if we are eventually erased by our own inability to stop destroying ourselves.

I'm really enjoying your channel. Thanks Adam.

This dude is “an escape “ to listen to. Just fascinating : )

Yuval is very impressive.

Just found the channel...excited!

Dude, chess is the example that makes me not worry. The computer has it's own set of biases and blind spots. And a really skilled human can exploit them.

Caution : Long Comment Follows “Evolution is a process of adaptation and given enough time and raw materials will eventually produce a fully evolved, perfectly adapted life form, which particular fully evolved perfectly adapted life form will be evidenced by the facts that, courtesy of its fully evolved perfectly adapted state, it will be able to live - indeed thrive - anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances or relocate or terra form to suit; doing so, moreover, without causing or inflicting any waste, loss or damage on either itself or on its surrounds both animate and inanimate alike: this fully adapted perfectly evolved life form will live in perfect harmony both with itself and also with all other things both animate and inanimate alike.” In that we sapiens can “live anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances or relocate or terra form to suit” we sapiens are, of course, this fully adapted, perfectly evolved life form. At least we would be !!!!!!! if we weren’t currently also inflicting heinously omnicidal kinds and amounts of waste, loss and damage on, well, on everything, both ourselves and each other and on everything else we touch both animate and inanimate alike here on our once glorious Planetary Home. Could we naked bipedal apes both subsist & reproduce without causing or inflicting any waste, loss or damage on anything ? Yes. (1). By, subsistence-wise, adopting a fruitarian plus scavenging diet, and living in caves !! (2). And reproduction-wise by doing so - by reproducing - at pretty much exactly the carrying capacity of our evolutionarily normal socio-ecological milieu. No more, no less. Is it possible to subsist in a completely non harmful, non destructive manner ?? Could we sapiens live well without causing any waste, loss or damage to anything or any one else ?? Answer : By becoming fruitarian/scavengers. The fruiting bodies of fruiting plants are not only not alive - so dining on them not only doesn’t kill anything, not only does not cause any harm to either the fruit itself nor to the planting body which produced it - but such a diet literally performs a quid-pro-quo favour to the fruiting plant. It’s a perfect two-way benefit. Dining on fruit not only provides excellent nourishment to the diner, it also provides a vital service to the fruiting plant by spreading its seeds around. No waste, loss nor damage here - the perfect, non-harmful, mutually beneficial ‘I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine’ arrangement. Furthermore, although scavengers benefit from the lethal savagery & the brutal infliction of fatal harm by others to their victims, strictly speaking scavengers do not cause the harm themselves ….. & once again they perform a valuable service to the ecology by removing waste from the environment. Archeological evidence strongly supports the conclusion that we sapiens were scavengers for the preponderance of our history. K-selection & Reproduction. What is K-selection ? K-selection is a selective pressure which has been operating from dot one. K-selection weeds out any lineage of life forms which reproduces either significantly above or significantly below the carrying capacity of its evolutionarily normal socio-ecological milieu. K-selection is a selective pressure which operates almost exclusively on the female of the species as males are both perennially & ubiquitously selected to operate via an entirely opposite pressure, namely r-selection, which is the acquisition of evolutionary adaptations which enable them to have large numbers of offspring & doing so pretty much entirely regardless of the carrying capacity of “K” - of the carrying capacity of the environment. Even a most cursory review of the natural world immediately informs one of one of its most important, observable & note worthy facts, namely the universal ‘centralisation’ of females. And even the most cursory understanding of the manner in which reality arranges its subjects, immediately alerts one to the (absolute) necessity of this ‘female centrality’ which is, of course, due to their (near) universal greater contribution to reproduction. Any Martian visitor would be agog with stupefying amazement at our own arrangement whereby our males are not only in charge of subsistence, but also of primary reproduction itself. ‘Female centrality’ is due to the fact that, almost universally, females not only perform the vast preponderance of primary reproductive work, but also possess, essentially, exactly the right kind of both reproductive know how (knowledge) as well as exactly the right kind of reproductive equipment by which to carry out this work. Note : Sex is not reproduction; reproduction is not sex. Males have neither the primary reproductive equipment nor the primary reproductive expertise with which to successfully deploy that equipment & if for any reason find themselves in charge of the task of primary reproduction in their species, the consequences will be de-evolutionary. The consequences may even be dire. As is the situation currently in our own species. Yes. As it pertains to primary reproduction, this reproductive know how exists in females & does so whether that knowledge is structured into their physiology, their instincts & reflexes or, as it is uniquely in our own case, also into our conscious cognitive knowledge, & whatever the source of their reproductive knowledge the situation remains such that females always ‘know better’ how to conduct their reproductive work than males. Once the principle of ‘female centrality’ is understood, the answer to (literally) all our woes - as all 8 billion of us stand here teetering with wind-puff precariousness on the very brink of mutually assured omnicidal oblivion - is easy & obvious. Unless we re-centralise women - & also restore Planet Earth back to its former state of matchless glory (unless we restore Planet Earth back to its former state of evolutionary normality) - we’re doomed. Neither Solm’s nor Harari’s ‘solutions’ come even remotely close to solving our problems. Indeed, the very opposite - they only greatly accelerate & exacerbate our inexorable slide into ever more certain & ever more wholly irreversible omnicidal oblivion. As Frederick Engels said in ‘The origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’. “The rise of patriarchy was the world historic defeat of woman”. A defeated woman cannot possibly fulfil her evolutionary position of being this planets most perfectly evolved life form …… nor possibly hope to discharge her primary reproductive work as nature intended. All you fellows out there in the disintegrating, stinking rubble of human civilisation could begin once again by opening doors, holding chairs, assisting in the donning of coats & jackets, rising to a standing position when a member of the fairer, & vastly more valuable sex enters the room. In short, you male chaps must put us ‘primary reproducers’ back on the pedestal of worshipful male reverence where we rightfully belong. And defer to us in all things.

Much good luck with your channel. I haven’t seen any other quite like it on RU-vid in its revelatory content

Thanks for this. You really gave me some things to think about.

Around 41:00 I think there’s a lack of focus on *what* data points it’s given in the first place and *what* information it’s trained on. Every AI is just an algorithm that concludes something based on its input data. So talking about “all the little input categories that contribute to a conclusion” should focus on the people that programmed it to look at those variables in the first place and to control how an algorithm is created and deployed.

Yuval: Humans are so powerful and destructive, and that's bad. Also Yuval: I serve the interests of powerful and destructive.

1:03-1:05 and the whole hunter-gathers not adopting, but being overrun was covered by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael with the Leavers and Takers. PLEASE READ THIS BOOK, folks. It's so good, because it's fiction, but a philosophical journey that intertwines with history. It's not about being RIGHT; it's about rethinking how we came to be this way. I bet Yuval read it. Too bad no one mentions it.

Looking forward to hearing Harari's take on the nuclear fusion breakthrough. A real game-changer!

As an aside I feel like this interview is very demonstrative of a tipping point in our fascination and understanding of the shortcomings of tech. The interviewee seems to be the old standard of not understanding tech and worshipping it as an AI and Adam very pointedly is an archetype of someone super aware of the limitations of tech and understands we don't need AI guided nail driving mechanisms when a hammer will do better and more efficiently. I also feel that once we get past some of these very tedious questions and discussions, I would like to talk about AI and tech in new ways. Like AI art. It works through permutations and in a way is the glass bead game of Herman Hesse... But even then it's interesting to consider it in such a way and it's implications. Even that in meta-metacontexual way, this might be finally a sign of the break from enlightenment era modernism and a focus on individualism and reason into a postmodern focus on the subjective nature of reality both on an individual and societal level. (This isn't the sort of woowoo metaphysics I was accusing the interviewee of being in my other comment, but rather one that values authenticity and the personal experience, such as how even in a world where every permutation is discovered, the emphasis may shift from discovering new permutations to the personal relationship to the particular permutation you are experiencing and interacting with. I.e. it's not about painting the next new starry night, but how viewing starry night affects me, or the experience of me painting starry night. Same with individualism to interpersonalism might be a shift from the concept of an individual as an island, and existentialism's personal responsibility to one that acknowledges relationship between people and starts discussing the implications of such)

Can you bring him on the show in 5-10yrs from now?

Would love to watch you standup!

This is a fantastic interview! Thank you!

The title really makes is sound like Yuval led humans in taking over the world.

Adam is probably the strangest crush I've ever had 🤣

Two quotes spring to mind: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C. Clarke) "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Juvenal

I thought people stopped listening to this guy after the Joe Rogan podcast.

Omg love his books. Great interview!

the perspective I got for our responsibility as human has made me see the world differently now.

We're a hyper social species. That played a role in our species success. What also helped is out crafting skills. Flint knapping is a lot harder than it looks.

Much nicer of the interviewer (Adam) to do his ads/sponsors separate to the meeting, don't want to distract the interviewee

gonna have to digest this episode for a while; Harari is like that though.

I wish ChatGTP released before this interview.. that would have become a great talking point.

One of the most serious irony of AI is that someone who created art with their own hands published his work on an art website and it was determined to be AI art and banned while the person 100% created that art without AI. That's a crazy precedent for corporations who wants to own everything so no one else do. They just have to say "Now what you created have never been created by you, it's the AI that did it" and the masses are unsuspecting enough to not pay attention. Humanity's knowledge is humanity's belonging. Period. And when we create something new, corporations don't have the right to steal it and pretend they did it. And that's what they do all the time, AI or no AI.

48:00 when talking about life being one long interview, a fail-safe could be that events from longer than 7 years ago is ignored so those things don't negatively affect you

I think Adam is dead on when he says the real issue isn't the technology in and of itself, it's the people making it that's the problem. Like...posit that we manage to make a positronic brain (using an Asimov trope) that is actually truly intelligent. The issue isn't that it'd be smarter than us. The issue is that all children need to be raised. This AGI (not just AI) would be a child. If it's raised by monsters... The problem is people. Always people.