Can Democracy Survive AI? A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, Yuval Noah Harari and I discuss the history and future of information networks. Listen to Part I on Apple or Spotify, and let us know what you think in the comments below. 

Can't wait until Thursday for Part 2? Subscribers can see the whole conversation here.

Last week was an exciting one for me. On Wednesday I sat down with Yuval Noah Harari, the legendary Israeli historian, in front of an audience that included many of you — about 200 friends, colleagues, and fans of the show — to celebrate the launch of Harari’s latest book: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. 

Did you read Sapiens? If you are not among the 25 million people who did, you have probably heard about it. It tells the story of our species in simple, declarative language without the academic squabbling, and in doing so, it does something extraordinary — it offers us a secular origin story not for our nation or ethnic group, but for our species. This I see as a great service, because origin stories are powerful. We crave them. They bind us together. They tell us who we are, and what we have in common. 

Harari has always had his critics (like the author of this withering attack on Saturday in The Times). Most are motivated, in my view, by a combination of professional jealousy and a misunderstanding of his intentions. He is not writing narrow, cautious, academic polemics thick with citations (though he did this once, earlier in his career); he is writing broadly accessible, sweeping histories that inform speculation about our collective future. This kind of work is important, even if it irritates academics.

In our conversation, we explore the central arguments of his latest book, Nexus. Throughout human history, Yuval argues, whenever we have invented a powerful new information technology, we have disrupted the foundations of human society, often with devastating consequences:

• Writing made property rights possible, which meant property could be taxed, which paved the way for the first empires.
• The printing press, invented in the 15th century, led to two centuries of religious wars and deranged witch hunts. It was not directly responsible for the scientific revolution, which began hundreds of years later. 
• The emergence of newspapers and the telegraph eventually made large-scale democracies possible, but the same technologies also enabled ruthless totalitarian regimes. 
• The internet and social media, combined with algorithms that amplify “user engagement” are destabilizing democracies globally. 
• Artificial Intelligence is empowering dictators with surveillance capabilities we could only have imagined a decade ago.

“When you have a major upheaval in information technology,” Harari told me, “You have an earthquake in democracies, and we are experiencing it right now all over the world. And if we don't pay attention and do something about it, democracy might collapse in the next few years.”

This conversation has given me pause. I have always thought of democracy as the natural outcome of human progress – this is what we learned in school, after all, and what we teach our children. But is it so? Social media seems to have weakened Democracies around the world. Can we collaborate to build benevolent, transparent, decentralized AIs that improve our health, provide bountiful clean energy, and liberate us from toil?

If you would like to explore this question further, listen to Part I of our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Can't wait until Thursday for Part 2? Subscribers can see the whole conversation here.

Why else might you want to listen to our conversation? If you'd like to learn about:

• Humorous political graffiti discovered in ancient Pompeii
• Allegations that 15th century witches to stole men’s penises and hid them in nests
• Harari’s experience in a “gifted kids” program, which he calls “the worst place I have been in my life”
• Why the hardest human problem will never be solved by AI