WHEN TECH KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF- Noah Harari and Tristan Harris interviewed by Wired(Quest saturday special)

NT: So the first step is recognizing that we’re all vulnerable, hackable.

TH: Right, vulnerable.

NT: But there are differences. Yuval is less hackable than I am because he meditates two hours a day and doesn’t use a smartphone. I’m super hackable. So what are the other things that a human can do to be less hackable?

YNH: So you need to get to know yourself as best as you can. It’s not a perfect solution but somebody is running after you, you run as fast as you can. I mean it’s a competition. So who knows you best in the world? So when you are 2 years old it’s your mother. Eventually you hope to reach a stage in life when you know yourself even better than your mother. And then suddenly, you have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back. They’re about to get to you—this is the critical moment. They know you better than you know yourself. So run away, run a little faster. And there are many ways you can run faster, meaning getting to know yourself a bit better. So meditation is one way. And there are hundreds of techniques of meditation, different ways work with different people. You can go to therapy, you can use art, you can use sports, whatever. Whatever works for you. But it’s now becoming much more important than ever before. You know it’s the oldest advice in the book: Know yourself. But in the past you did not have competition. If you lived in ancient Athens and Socrates came along and said, “Know yourself. It’s a good, it’s good for you.” And you said, “No I’m too busy. I have this olive grove I have to deal with—I don’t have time.” So OK, you didn’t get to know yourself better, but there was nobody else who was competing with you. Now you have serious competition. So you need to get to know yourself better. But this is like the first maxim. Secondly as an individual, if we talk about what’s happening to society you should realize you can’t do much by yourself. Join an organization. Like if you’re really concerned about this, this week join some organization. Fifty people who work together are a far more powerful force than 50 individuals, who each of them is an activist. It’s good to be an activist. It’s much better to be a member of an organization. And then there are other tested and tried methods of politics. We need to go back to this messy thing of making political regulations and choices of all this. It’s maybe the most important. Politics is about power. And this is where power is right now.

TH: I’ll add to that. I think there’s a temptation to say OK, how can we protect ourselves? And when this conversation shifts into my smartphone not hacking me, you get things like, Oh I’ll set my phone to grayscale. Oh I’ll turn off notifications. But what that misses is that you live inside of a social fabric. We walk outside. My life depends on the quality of other people’s thoughts, beliefs, and lives. So if everyone around me believes a conspiracy theory because YouTube is taking 1.9 billion human animals and tilting the playing field so everyone watches Infowars—by the way, YouTube has driven 15 billion recommendations of Alex Jones InfoWars, and that’s recommendation. And then 2 billion views—if only one in a thousand people believe those 2 billion views, that’s still 2 million people.

YNH: Mathematics is not our strong suit.

TH: And so if that’s 2 million people, that’s still 2 million new conspiracy theorists. If you say hey I am a kid I’m a teenager and I don’t want to care about the number of likes I get so I’m going to stop using Snapchat or Instagram. I don’t want to be hacked from my self-worth in terms of likes. I can say I don’t want to use those things but I still live in a social fabric where all my other sexual opportunities, social opportunities, homework transmission, where people talk about that stuff, if they only use Instagram, I have to participate in that social fabric. So I think we have to elevate the conversation from, How do I make sure I’m not hacked. It’s not just an individual conversation. We want society to not be hacked, which goes to the political point and sort of how do we politically mobilize as a group to change the whole industry. I mean, for me, I think about the tech industry.

NT: So that’s sort of step one in this three step question. What can individuals do? Know yourself, make society more resilient, make society less able to be hacked. What about the transmission between the supercomputer and the human? What are the rules and how should we think about how to limit the ability of the supercomputer to hack you?

YNH: That’s a big one.

TH: That’s a big question.

NT: That’s why we’re here!

YNH: In essence, I think that we need to come to terms with the fact that we can’t prevent it completely. And it’s not because of the AI, it’s because of the biology. It’s just the type of of animals that we are, and the type of knowledge that now we have about the human body, about the human brain. We have reached a point when this is really inevitable. And you don’t even need a biometric sensor, you can just use a camera in order to tell what is my blood pressure. What’s happening now, and through that, what’s happening to me emotionally. So I would say we need to reconceptualize completely our world. And this is why I began by saying that we suffer from philosophical impoverishment, that we are still running on the ideas of the basically the 18th century, which are good for two or three centuries, which were very good, but which are simply not adequate to understanding what’s happening right now. And which is why I also think that, you know, with all the talk about the job market and what should they study today that will be relevant to the job market in 20-30 years, I think philosophy is one of the best bets maybe.

NT: I sometimes joke my wife studied philosophy and dance in college, which at the time seemed like the two worst professions because you can’t really get a job in either. But now they’re are like the last two things that will get replaced by robots.

TH: I think that Yuval is right. I think, often, this conversation usually makes people conclude that there’s nothing about human choice or the human mind’s feelings that’s worth respecting. And I don’t think that is the point. I think the point is that we need a new kind of philosophy that acknowledges a certain kind of thinking or cognitive process or conceptual process or social process that we we want that. Like for example [James] Fishkin is a professor at Stanford who’s done work on deliberative democracy and shown that if you get a random sample of people in a hotel room for two days and you have experts come in and brief them about a bunch of things, they change their minds about issues, they go from being polarized to less polarized, they can come to more agreement. And there’s a sort of a process there that you can put in a bin and say, that’s a social cognitive sense-making process that we might want to be sampling from that one as opposed to an alienated lonely individual who’s been shown photos of their friends having fun without them all day, and then we’re hitting them with Russian ads. We probably don’t want to be sampling a signal from that person—not that we don’t want from that person, but we don’t want that process to be the basis of how we make collective decisions. So I think, you know, we’re still stuck in a mind-body meatsuit, we’re not getting out of it, so we better learn how do we use it in a way that brings out the higher angels of our nature, the more reflective parts of ourselves. So I think what technology designers need to do is ask that question. So a good example, just to make it practical, let’s take YouTube again. So what’s the difference between a teenager—let’s take the example of: You watch the ukulele video. It’s a very common thing on YouTube. There’s lots of ukulele videos, how to play ukulele. What’s going on in that moment when it recommends other ukulele videos? Well there’s actually a value of someone wants to learn how to play the ukulele, but the computer doesn’t know that, it’s just recommending more ukulele videos. But if it really knew that about you instead of just saying, here’s like infinite more ukulele videos to watch, it might say and here’s your 10 friends who know how to play ukulele that you didn’t know know how to play ukulele and you can go hang out with them. It could basically put those choices at the top of life’s menu.

YNH: The system in itself can do amazing things for us. We just need to turn it around, that it serves our interests, whatever that is and not the interests of the corporation or the government. OK, now that we realize that our brains can be hacked, we need an antivirus for the brain, just as we have one for the computer. And it can work on the basis of the same technology. Let’s say you have an AI sidekick who monitors you all the time, 24 hours a day. What do you write? What do you see? Everything. But this AI is serving you as this fiduciary responsibility. And it gets to know your weaknesses, and by knowing your weaknesses it can protect you against other agents trying to hack you and to exploit your weaknesses. So if you have a weakness for funny cat videos and you spend an enormous amount of time, an inordinate amount of time, just watching—you know it’s not very good for you, but you just can’t stop yourself clicking, then the AI will intervene, and whenever these funny cat videos try to pop up the AI says no no no no. And it will just show you maybe a message that somebody just tried to hack you. Just as you get these messages about somebody just tried to infect your computer with a virus and it can end. I mean, the hardest thing for us is to admit our own weaknesses and biases, and it can go all ways. If you have a bias against Trump or against Trump supporters, so you would very easily believe any story, however far fetched and ridiculous. So, I don’t know, Trump thinks the world is flat. Trump is in favor of killing all the Muslims. You would click on that. This is your bias. And the AI will know that, and it’s completely neutral, it doesn’t serve any entity out there. It just gets to know your weaknesses and biases and tries to protect you against them.

NT: But how does it learn that it is a weakness and a bias? And not something you genuinely like?

TH: This is where I think we need a richer philosophical framework. Because if you have that, then you can make that that understanding. So if a teenager is sitting there and in that moment is watching the dieting video and then they’re shown the anorexia video. Imagine instead of a 22-year-old male engineer who went to Stanford, a computer scientist, thinking about, What can I show them that’s like the perfect thing? You had a 80-year-old child developmental psychologist who studied under the best child developmental psychologists and thought about in those kinds of moments the thing that’s usually going on for a teenager at age 13 is a feeling of insecurity, identity development, like experimentation. What would be best for them? So we think about this is like the whole framework of humane technology is we think this is the thing: We have to hold up the mirror to ourselves to understand our vulnerabilities first. And you design starting from a view of what we’re vulnerable to. I think from a practical perspective I totally agree with this idea of an AI sidekick but if we’re imagining like we live in the reality, the scary reality that we’re talking about right now. It’s not like this is some sci-fi future. This is the actual state. So we’re actually thinking about how do we navigate to an actual state of affairs that we want, we probably don’t want an AI sidekick to be this kind of optional thing that some people who are rich can afford and other people who don’t can’t, we probably want it to be baked into the way technology works in the first place, so that it does have a fiduciary responsibility to our best, subtle, compassionate, vulnerable interests.

NT: So we will have government sponsored AI sidekicks? We will have corporations that sell us AI sidekicks but subsidize them, so it’s not just the affluent that have really good AI sidekicks?

TH: This is where business model conversation comes in.

YNH: One thing is to change the way that—if you go to university or college and learn computer science then an integral part of the course is to learn about ethics, about the ethics of coding. And it’s really, I think it’s extremely irresponsible, that you can’t finish, you can have a degree in computer science and in coding and you can design all these algorithms that now shape people’s lives, and you just don’t have any background in thinking ethically and philosophically about what you are doing. You were just thinking in terms of pure technicality or in economic terms. And so this is one thing which kind of makes it into the cake from the first place.

NT: Now let me ask you something that has come up a couple of times that I’ve been wondering about. So when you were giving the ukulele example you talked about well maybe you should go see friends who play ukulele, you should go visit them offline. And in your book you say that one of the crucial moments for Facebook will come when an engineer realizes that the thing that is better for the person and for community is for them to leave their computer. And then what will Facebook do with that? So it does seem, from a moral perspective, that a platform, if it realizes it would be better for you to go offline and see somebody, they should encourage you to do that. But then, they will lose their money and they will be outcompeted. So how do you actually get to the point where the algorithm, the platform pushes somebody in that direction?

TH: So this is where this business model conversation comes in is so important and also why Apple and Google’s role is so important because they are before the business model of all these apps that want to steal your time and maximize attention.

So Android and iOS, not to make this too technical or an industry-focused conversation, but they should theoretically—that layer, you have just the device, who should that be serving? Whose best interest are they serving? Do they want to make the apps as successful as possible? And make the time, you know, the addictive, maximizing, you know, loneliness, alienation, and social comparison all that stuff? Or should that layer be a fiduciary as the AI sidekick to our deepest interests, to our physical embodied lives, to our physical embodied communities. Like we can’t escape this instrument, and it turns out that being inside of community and having face to face contact is, you know—there’s a reason why solitary confinement is the worst punishment we give human beings. And we have technology that’s basically maximizing isolation because it needs to maximize the time we stay on the screen. So I think one question is how can Apple and Google move their entire businesses to be about embodied local fiduciary responsibility to society. And what we think of as humane technology, that that’s the direction that they can go. Facebook could also change its business model to be more about payments and people transacting based on exchanging things which is something they’re looking into with the blockchain stuff that they’re theoretically working on and also messenger payments. If they move from an advertising-based business model to micropayments, they could actually shift the design of some of those things. And there could be whole teams of engineers at News Feed that are just thinking about what’s best for society and then people would still ask these questions of, well who’s Facebook to say what’s good for society? But you can’t get out of that situation because they do shape what 2 billion human animals will think and feel every day.

NT: So this gets me to one of the things I most want to hear your thoughts on, which is Apple and Google have both done this to some degree in the last year. And Facebook has. I believe every executive at every tech company has said “time well spent” at some point in the last year. We’ve had a huge conversation about it and people have bought 26 trillion of these books. Do you actually think that we are heading in the right direction at this moment because change is happening and people are thinking? Or do you feel like we’re still going in the wrong direction?

YNH: I think that in the tech world we are going in the right direction in the sense that people are realizing the stakes. People are realizing the immense power that they have in their hands—I’m talking about people in the tech world—they are realizing the influence they have on politics, on society, on and on. And most of them react, I think, in not the best way possible, but certainly the responsible way in understanding, yes, we have this huge impact on the world. We didn’t plan that maybe. But this is happening and we need to think very carefully what to do with that. They don’t know what to do with that. Nobody really knows, but at least the first step has been accomplished, of realizing what is happening and taking some responsibility. The place where we see a very negative development is on the global level because all the talk so far has really been kind of internal Silicon Valley, California, USA talk. But things are happening in other countries. I mean all the talk we’ve had so far relied on what’s happening in liberal democracies and in free markets. In some countries, maybe you have got no choice whatsoever. You just have to share all your information and you just have to do what the government sponsored algorithm tells you to do. So it’s a completely different conversation and then another kind of complication is the AI arms race that five years ago, or even two years ago, there was no such thing. And now it’s maybe the number one priority in many places around the world that there is an arms race going on in AI, and we, our country, needs to win this arms race. And when you enter an arms race situation, then it becomes very quickly a race to the bottom, because you can very often hear this, OK, It’s a bad idea to do this, to develop that, but they are doing it and it gives them some advantage and we can’t stay behind. We are the good guys. We don’t want to do it, but we can’t allow the bad guys to be ahead of us so we must do it first. And you ask the other people, they will say the same thing. And this is this is an extremely dangerous development.

TH: It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. It’s a multipolar trap. I mean every actor—no one wants to build slaughter bot drones. But if I think you might be doing it, even though I don’t want to, I have to build and you build it. And we both hold them.

NT: And even at a deeper level if you want to build some ethics into your slaughter bot drones but it will slow you down.

TH: Right. And one of the challenges—one of the things I think we talked about when we first met was the ethics of speed, of clock rate. Because the faster—we’re in essence competing on who can go faster to make this stuff but faster means more likely to be dangerous, less likely to be safe. So it’s basically we’re racing as fast as possible to create the things we should probably be going as slow as possible to create. And I think that you know much like high-frequency trading in the financial markets, you don’t want people blowing up whole mountains so they can lay these copper cables so they can trade a microsecond faster. So you’re not even competing based on you know an Adam Smith version of what we value or something like that. You’re competing based on basically who can blow up mountains and make transactions faster. When you add high-frequency trading to who can program human beings faster and who’s more effective at manipulating culture wars across the world, that just becomes this like race to the bottom of the brainstem of total chaos. So I think we have to say how do we slow this down and create a sensible pace, and I think this is also about a humane technology of instead of a child development psychologist, ask someone, like you know the psychologist, what are the clock rates of human decision making where we actually tend to make good thoughtful choices? You probably don’t want a whole society revved up to, you know, making 100 choices per hour about something that really matters. So what is the right clock rate? I think we have to actually have technology steer us towards those kinds of decision making processes.

Is the Problem Getting Better, or Worse?

NT: So back to the original question. You’re somewhat optimistic about some of the small things that are happening in this very small place? But deeply pessimistic about the complete obliteration of humanity?

TH: I think that Yuval’s point is right that, you know there’s a question about US tech companies, which are bigger than many governments—Facebook controls 2.2 billion people’s thoughts. Mark Zuckerberg is editor in chief of 2.2 billion people’s thoughts. But then there’s also, you know, world governments or, sorry, national governments that are governed by a different set of rules. I think the tech companies are very, very slowly waking up to this. And so far, you know, with the Time Well Spent stuff, for example, it’s let’s help people, because they’re vulnerable to how much time they spend, set a limit on how much time they spend. But that doesn’t tackle any of these bigger issues about how you can program thoughts of a democracy, how mental health and alienation can be rampant among teenagers leading to doubling the rates of teen suicide for girls in the last eight years. So you know we’re going to have to have a much more comprehensive view and restructuring of the tech industry to think about what’s good for people. And there’s going to be an uncomfortable transition, I’ve used this metaphor, it’s like with climate change. There are certain moments in history when an economy is propped up by something we don’t want. So the biggest example of this is slavery in the 1800s. There was a point at which slavery was propping up the entire world economy. You couldn’t just say we don’t want to do this anymore let’s just suck it out of the economy. The whole economy will collapse if you did that. But the British Empire when they decided to abolish slavery, they had to give up 2 percent of their GDP every year for 60 years and they were able to make that transition over a transition period, and so I’m not equating advertising or programming human beings to slavery. I’m not. But there’s a similar structure of the entire economy now, if you look at the stock market, like a huge chunk of the value, is driven by these advertising programming-human-animals-based systems. If we wanted to suck out that model, the advertising model, we actually can’t afford that transition. But there could be awkward years where you’re basically in that long transition path. I think in this moment we have to do it much faster than we’ve done in other situations because the threats are more urgent.

NT: Yuval, do you agree that that is one of the things we have to think about as we think about trying to fix the world system over the next decades?

YNH: It’s one of the things. But again, the problem of the world, of humanity, is not just the advertising model. I mean the basic tools were designed—you had the brightest people in the world, 10 or 20 years ago, cracking this problem of, How do I get people to click on ads? Some of the smartest people ever, this was their job, to solve this problem. And they solved it. And then the methods that they initially used to sell us underwear and sunglasses and vacations in the Caribbean and things like that, they were hijacked and weaponized, and are now used to sell us all kinds of things, including political opinions and entire ideologies. And it’s now no longer under the control of the tech giant in Silicon Valley that pioneered these methods. These methods are out there. So even if you get Google and Facebook to completely give it up, the cat is out of the bag. People already know how to do it. And there is an arms race in this arena. So yes, we need to figure out this advertisement business. It’s very important. But it won’t solve the human problem. And I think now the only really effective way to do it is on the global level. And for that we need global cooperation on regulating AI, regulating the development of AI and of biotechnology, and we are, of course, heading in the opposite direction of global cooperation.

TH: I agree actually that there’s this notion of game theory. Sure Facebook and Google could do it, but that doesn’t matter because the cat’s out of the bag, and governments are going to do it, and other tech companies are going to do it, and Russia’s tech infrastructure is going to do it. So how do you stop it from happening?

Not to bring it back—not to equate slavery in a similar way, but when the British Empire decided to abolish slavery and subtract their dependence on that for their economy, they actually were concerned that if we do this, France’s economy is still going to be powered by slavery and they’re going to soar way past way past us. So from a competition perspective we can’t do this but the way they got there was by turning it into a universal global human rights issue. That took a longer time but I think this is like Yuval says, I agree that it’s this is a global conversation about human nature and human freedom. If there is such a thing but at least kinds of human freedom that we want to preserve and that I think is something that is actually in everyone’s interest and it’s not necessarily equal capacity to achieve that because governments are very powerful. But we’re going to move in that direction by having a global conversation about it

NT: So let’s end this with giving some advice to someone who is watching this video. They’ve just watched an Alex Jones video and the YouTube algorithm has changed and sent him here, and they’ve somehow got to this point. They’re 18 years old, they want to devote their life to making sure that the dynamic between machines and humans does not become exploitive and becomes one in which we continue to live our rich fulfilled lives. What should they do or what advice would you give them?

YNH: I would say that, get to know yourself much better and have as few illusions about yourself as possible. If a desire pops in your mind don’t just say well this is my free will. I chose this therefore it’s good, I should do it. Explore much deeper. Secondly as I said join an organization. There is very little you can do just as as an individual by yourself. That’s the two most important pieces of advice I could give an individual who is watching us now.

TH: And I think your earlier suggestion to understand that the philosophy of simple rational human choice is—we have to move from an 18th century model of how human beings work to a 21st century model of how human beings work. Our work is we’re trying to coordinate kind of a global movement towards fixing some of these issues around human technology. And I think that like Yuval says you can’t do it alone. It’s not like, Let me turn my phone grayscale or let me like you know petition my congressmember by myself. This is a global movement. The good news is no one wants the dystopian endpoint of the stuff that we’re talking about. It’s not like someone says no, no. I’m really excited about this dystopia, I just want to keep doing what we’re doing. No one wants that. So it’s really a matter of can we all unify and the thing that we do want and it’s it’s somewhere in this vicinity of what we’re talking about. And no one has to catch the flag but we have to move away from the direction we’re going. I think everyone should be on the same page on that.

NT: Well I, you know we started this conversation in a time where the optimistic and I am certainly optimistic that we have covered some of the hardest questions facing humanity that you have offered brilliant insights into them. So thank you for talking and thank you for being here. Thank you. Tristan. Thank you, Yuval.

Ref:https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-yuval-noah-harari-tristan-harris/)