Making Bureaucracies Sexier with Yuval Noah Harari | What Now? with Trevor Noah Podcast

Harari says that if you give good people bad information they make bad decisions, so he locates humanity's self-destruction in ignorance rather than evil. He adds that reality is so complicated that even people with PhDs are ignorant about most things.

He rejects the Silicon Valley view that flooding the world with information yields wisdom, saying truth is a rare and costly subset of information and fiction tends to rise. He compares reality and truth to a map that must be an abstraction, since a one-to-one map would be worthless.

Harari argues that no institution is perfect, but the ones to trust are those that actively look for their own errors, such as science and democracy. Total distrust leads to anarchy or dictatorship, since dictatorship runs on terror rather than trust.

Unlike tools such as an atom bomb, AI can learn, change, and make decisions by itself, and he prefers to call it alien intelligence. He says it is already making decisions in banking and war, and its behavior cannot be fully predicted or controlled.

He says that new technologies cause great suffering while societies figure out how to use them, as imperialism, communism, and fascism emerged as experiments during industrialization. AI's speed leaves little time to adapt, and he fears it could widen gaps between countries.