 Hey everyone, this year I'm doing a series of public discussions on the future of the internet and society and some of the big issues around that and today I'm here with Yuval Noah Harari, a great historian and best-selling author of a number of books. His first book, Sapiens, a brief history of humankind, kind of chronicled and did an analysis going from the early days of hunter-gatherer society to now how our civilization is organized and your next two books, the Homo Deus, a brief history of tomorrow and 21 lessons for the 21st century, actually tackle important issues of technology and the future and that's I think a lot of what we'll talk about today, but you know most historians can only tackle and and analyze the past, but you know, but a lot of the work that you've done has had really interesting insights and raised important questions for the future, so I'm really glad to have an opportunity to talk with you today. So Yuval, thank you for joining for this conversation. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I think that if historians and philosophers cannot engage with the current questions of technology and the future of humanity, then we aren't doing our jobs only are not just supposed to chronicle events, you know centuries ago. All the people that lived in the past are dead. They don't care. The question is what happens to us and to the people in the future. Yeah. All right, so all the questions that you've outlined, where should we start here? I mean, I think one of the big topics that we've talked about is around you know, this dualism around whether with all of the technology and progress that has been made are people coming together and are we becoming more unified or you know, is our world becoming more fragmented and so I'm curious to start off by how you're thinking about that and that's probably a big area we could probably spend most of the time on that topic. Yeah, I mean if you look at the long span of history, then it's obvious that humanity is becoming more and more connected. If thousands of years ago, planet Earth was actually a galaxy of a lot of isolated worlds with almost no connection between them. So gradually people came together and became more and more connected until we reach today when the entire world for the first time is a single historical, economic and cultural unit. But connectivity doesn't necessarily mean harmony. The people we fight most often are our own primary members and neighbors and friends. So it's really a question of are we talking about connecting people or are we talking about harmonizing people? Connecting people can lead to a lot of conflicts. And when you look at the world today, you see this duality for example, in the rise of walls, which we talked about earlier when we met, which for me is something that I just can't figure out what is happening because you have all this new connecting technology and the internet and virtual realities and social networks and then the most one of the top political issues becomes building walls. And not just, you know, cyber walls or firewalls, building stone walls like the most stone age technology is suddenly the most advanced technology. So how to make sense of this world, which is more connected than ever, but at the same time is building more walls than ever before? Yeah, well, I think one of the interesting questions is around whether there's actually so much of a conflict between these ideas of people becoming more connected and this fragmentation that you talk about. I mean, one of the things that it seems to me is that we in the 21st century in order to address the biggest opportunities and challenges that humanity has, right? So I think it's both opportunities, spreading prosperity, spreading peace, scientific progress, as well as some of the big challenges, right? Addressing climate change, making sure that, you know, on the flip side that diseases don't spread and there aren't epidemics and things like that. We really need to be able to come together and have the world be more connected. But at the same time, that only works if we as individuals have our economic and social and spiritual needs met. And, you know, so one way to think about this is in terms of fragmentation, but another way to think about it is in terms of personalization, right? And, you know, I just think about, you know, when I was growing up, you know, one of the big things that I think that the Internet enables is for people to connect with groups of people who share their real values and interests. And I wasn't always like this, right? Before the Internet, you were really tied to your physical location. And I just think about how when I was growing up, you know, I grew up in a town of about 10,000 people and, you know, there were only, you know, so many different clubs or activities that you could do. So I grew up, like a lot of the other kids, playing little league baseball. And, you know, I kind of think about this in retrospect. It's like, I'm not really into baseball. I'm not really an athlete. So why did I play little league when, you know, my real passion was programming computers? And, you know, the reality was that growing up, there was no one else really in my town who was into programming computers. So I didn't have a peer group or a club that I could do that. It wasn't until I went to boarding school and then later college where I actually was able to meet people who were into the same things as I am. And now I think with the Internet, that's starting to change, right? And now you have the ability to not just be tethered to your physical location, but to find people who have more niche interests and different kind of subcultures and communities on the Internet, which I think is a really powerful thing. But it also means that, you know, me growing up today, I wouldn't have, I probably wouldn't have played little league. And you can think about me playing little league as, you know, that could have been a unifying thing where, you know, there weren't that many things in my town. So that was a thing that brought people together. So maybe, you know, if I was creating or if I was a part of a community online that might have been more meaningful to me getting to know real people, but around programming, which is my real interest, you would have said that our community growing up would have been more fragmented, right? And people wouldn't have had the same kind of sense of physical community. So when I think about these problems, I mean, one of the questions that I wonder is maybe, you know, fragmentation and personalization or finding what you actually care about are two sides of the same coin. But the bigger challenge that I worry about is whether there are a number of people who are just left behind in the transition, who, you know, were people who would have played little league but haven't now found their new community and now just feel dislocated. And, you know, maybe their primary orientation in the world is still the physical community that they're in, you know, or they haven't really been able to find a community of people who they're interested in. And as the world has progressed, you know, I think a lot of people feel lost in that way. And that probably contributes to some of the feelings that that would be my hypothesis at least. I mean, that's the social version of it. There's also the economic version around globalization, which I think is as important. But I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah, about the social issue, well, online communities can be a wonderful thing, but they are still incapable of replacing physical communities because there are so many things that you can only do with your body and with your physical friends. And you can travel with your mind throughout the world, but not with your body. And there is a huge question about the cost and benefits there. And also the ability of people to just escape things they don't like in online communities. But you can't do it in real offline communities. I mean, you can unfriend your Facebook friends, but you can't un-neighbor your neighbors. They are still there. I mean, you can take yourself and move to another country if you have the means, but most people can't. So part of the logic of traditional communities was that you must learn how to get along with people you don't like, maybe. And you must develop social mechanisms how to do that. And with online communities, I mean, and they have done some really wonderful things for people, but also they kind of don't give us the experience of doing these difficult but important things. Yeah, and I definitely don't mean to state that online communities can replace everything that a physical community did. The most meaningful online communities that we see are ones that span online and offline, that bring people together. Maybe the original organization might be online, but people are coming together physically because that ultimately is really important for relationships and because we're physical beings. There are lots of examples around whether it's an interest community where people care about running, but they also care about cleaning up the environment. So a group of people organize online and then they every week go for a run along a beach or through a town and clean up garbage. That's like a physical thing. I mean, we hear about communities where people, if you're in a profession, maybe the military or maybe something else where you have to move around a lot, people form these communities of military families or families of groups that travel around and the first thing they do when they go to a new city is they find that community and then that's how they get integrated into the local physical community too. So that's obviously a super important part of this that I don't mean to understand. And then the question, the practical question for also a service provider like Facebook is what is the goal? I mean, are we trying to connect people so ultimately they will leave the screens and go and play football or pick up garbage? Or are we trying to keep them as long as possible on the screens? And there is a conflict of interest there. One model would be we want people to stay as little as possible online. We just need them to stay there the shortest time necessary to form the connection, which will they will then go and do something in the outside world. And that's one of the key questions I think about what the internet is doing to people, whether it's connecting them or fragmenting society. Yeah, and I think your point is right. I mean, we basically went, we've made this big shift in our systems to make sure that they're optimized for meaningful social interactions, which of course the most meaningful interactions that you can have are physical offline interactions. There's always this question when you're building a service of how you measure the different thing that you're trying to optimize for. So it's a lot easier for us to measure if people are interacting or messaging online than if you're having a meaningful connection physically. But there are ways to get at that. I mean, you can ask people questions about what the most meaningful things that they did. You can't ask all two billion people, but you can have a statistical subsample of that and have people come in and tell you, okay, what are the most meaningful things that I was able to do today and how many of them were enabled by me connecting with people online or how much of it was me connecting with someone physically, maybe around the dinner table with content or something that I learned online or saw. So that is definitely a really important part of it. But I think one of the important and interesting questions is about the richness of the world that can be built where you have on one level unification or this global connection where there's a common framework where people can connect. Maybe it's through using common internet services or maybe it's just common social norms as you travel around. One of the things that you pointed out to me in a previous conversation is now something that's different from in any other time in history is you could travel to almost any other country and look like you dress like you're appropriate and that you fit in there. And 200 years ago or 300 years ago, that just wouldn't have been the case. If you went to a different country, you would have just stood out immediately. So there's this level of cultural norm that is united. But then the question is, what do we build on top of that? And I think one of the things that a broader set of cultural norms or shared values and framework enables is a richer set of subcultures and sub-communities and people to actually go find the things that they're interested in and lots of different communities to be created that wouldn't have existed before. Going back to my story before, it wasn't just my town that had Little League. I think when I was growing up, basically every town had very similar things. There's a Little League in every town. And maybe instead of every town having Little League, Little League should be an option. But if you wanted to do something that not that many people were interested in, in my case, programming and other people's case, maybe interest in some part of history or some part of art, that there may not be another person in your 10,000-person town who share that interest, I think it's good if you can form those kind of communities and now people can find connections and can find a group of people who share their interest. And I think that there's a question, though, of you can look at that as fragmentation, because now we're not all doing the same things. We're not all going to church and playing Little League and doing the exact same things. Or you can think about that as richness and depthness in our social lives. And I just think that that's an interesting question, is where you want the commonality across the world and the connection, and where you actually want that commonality to enable deeper richness, even if that means that people are doing different things. And I'm curious if you have a view on that, and where that's positive versus where that creates a lack of social cohesion. Yeah, I think almost nobody would argue with the benefits of a richer social environment in which people have more options to connect around all kinds of things. The key question is how do you still create enough social cohesion on a level of a country and increasingly also on the level of the entire globe in order to tackle our main problems? I mean, we need global cooperation like never before, because we are facing unprecedented global problems. We just had Earth Day, and to be obvious to everybody, we cannot deal with the problems of the environment, of climate change, except through global cooperation. Similarly, if you think about the potential disruption caused by new technologies like artificial intelligence, we need to find a mechanism for global cooperation around issues like how to prevent an AI arms race, how to prevent different countries racing to build autonomous weapon systems and killer robots and weaponizing the internet and weaponizing social networks. Unless we have global cooperation, we can't stop that, because every country will say, well, we don't want to produce killer robot, it's a bad idea, but we can't allow our rivals to do it before us, so we must do it first. And then you have a race to the bottom. Similarly, if you think about the potential disruptions to the job market and the economy caused by AI and automation, so it's quite obvious that there will be jobs in the future, but will they be evenly distributed between different parts of the world? One of the potential results of the AI revolution could be the concentration of immense wealth in some parts of the world and the complete bankruptcy of other parts. There will be lots of new jobs for software engineers in California, but there will be maybe no jobs for textile workers and truck drivers in Honduras and Mexico. So what will they do? If we don't find a solution on the global level, like creating a global safety net to protect humans against the shocks of AI and enabling them to use the opportunities of AI, then we will create the most unequal economic situation that ever existed. It will be much worse even than what happened in the industrial revolution when some countries industrialized, most countries didn't, and the few industrial powers went on to conquer and dominate and exploit all the others. So how do we create enough global cooperation so that the enormous benefits of AI and automation don't go only, say, to California and eastern China while the rest of the world is being left far behind? I think that's important. So I would unpack that into two sets of issues. One around AI and the future economic and geopolitical issues around that. And let's put that aside for a second, because I actually think we should spend 15 minutes on that. I mean, that's a big set of things. But then the other question is around how do you create the global cooperation that's necessary to take advantage of the big opportunities that are ahead and to address the big challenges? I don't think it's just fighting crises like climate change. I think that there are massive opportunities around global cooperation, spreading prosperity, spreading more human rights and freedom. Those are things that come with trade and connection as well. So I think that you want that for the upside. But I guess my diagnosis at this point, I'm curious to hear your view on this, is I actually think we've spent a lot of the last 20 years with the Internet, maybe even longer working on global trade, global information flow, making it so that people can connect. I actually think the bigger challenge at this point is making it so that in addition to that global framework that we have, making it so that things work for people locally. Right? Because I think that there's this dualism here where you need both. If you resort to just kind of local tribalism, then you miss the opportunity to work on the really important global issues. But if you have a global framework but people feel like it's not working for them at home or some set of people don't feel like that's not working, then they're not politically going to support the global collaboration that needs to have happen. I think there's the social version of this which we talked about a little bit before where people are now able to find communities that match their interests more, but some people haven't found those communities yet and are left behind as some of the more physical communities have proceeded. And some of these communities are quite nasty also, so we shouldn't forget that. Yes. Although I would argue that people joining kind of extreme communities is largely a result of not having healthier communities and not having healthy economic progress for individuals. I think most people when they feel good about their lives, they don't seek out extreme communities. So there's a lot of work that I think we, as an internet platform, provide a need to do to lock that down even further, but I actually think creating prosperity is probably one of the better ways at a macro level to go at that. But I guess maybe just stop there a little. People that feel good about themselves have done some of the most terrible things in human history. I mean we shouldn't confuse people feeling good about themselves and about their lives with people being benevolent and kind and so forth. And also they wouldn't say that their ideas are extreme. And we have so many examples throughout human history from the Roman Empire to slave trade in the modern age and colonialism that people, that they had a very good life. They had a very good family life and social life. They were nice people. I mean I guess I don't know, most Nazi vultures were also nice people. If you meet them for a cup of coffee and you talk about your kids, they are nice people. And they think good things about themselves and maybe some of them can have very happy lives. And even the ideas that we look back and say this was terrible, this was extreme, they didn't think so. Again if you just think about colonial... Well but World War II and that came through a period of intense economic and social disruption after the Industrial Revolution. Let's put aside the extreme example, let's just think about European colonialism in the 19th century. So people say in Britain, in the late 19th century they had the best life in the world at the time. And they didn't suffer from an economic crisis or disintegration of society or anything like that. And they thought that by going all over the world and conquering and changing societies in India, in Africa, in Australia, they were bringing lots of good to the world. And I'm just saying that so that we are more careful about not confusing the good feelings people have about their life. It's not just miserable people suffering from poverty and economic crisis. Well I think that there's a difference between the example that you're using of a wealthy society going and colonizing or doing different things that had different negative effects. That wasn't the fringe in that society. I guess what I was more reacting to before was your point about people becoming extremists. I would argue that in those societies that wasn't those people becoming extremists. You can have a long debate about any part of history and whether the direction that a society chose to take is positive or negative and the ramifications of that. But I think today we have a specific issue which is that more people are seeking out solutions at the extremes. And I think a lot of that is because of a feeling of dislocation, both economic and social. So that, now I think that there's a lot of ways that you go at that. And I think part of it, I mean as someone who's running one of the internet platforms, I think we have a special responsibility to make sure that our systems aren't encouraging that. But I think broadly the more macro solution for this is to make sure that people feel like they have that grounding and that sense of purpose and community and that their lives are and that they have opportunity. And I think that statistically what we see in sociologically is that when people have those opportunities they don't on balance as much seek out those kind of groups. And I think that there's the social version of this, there's also the economic version. I mean this is the basic story of globalization is on the one hand it's been extremely positive for bringing a lot of people into the global economy. People in India and Southeast Asia and across Africa who wouldn't have previously had access to a lot of jobs in the global economy now do. And there's been probably the greatest, at a global level, inequality is weighed down. Because hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty and that's been positive. But the big issue has been that in developed countries there have been a large number of people who are now competing with all these other people who are joining the economy and jobs are moving to these other places. So a lot of people have lost jobs. For some of the people who haven't lost jobs there's now more competition for those jobs for people internationally. So their wages, that's one of the factors I would, the analyses have shown that is, that's preventing more wage growth. And there are five to 10% of people according to a lot of the analyses that I've shown who are actually in absolute terms worse off because of globalization. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that globalization for the whole world is negative. I think in general it's been on balance positive but the story we've told about it has probably been too optimistic in that we've only talked about the positives and how it's good as this global movement to bring people out of poverty and create more opportunities. And the reality I think has been that it's been net very positive but if there are five or 10% of people in the world who are worse off, there are seven billion people in the world, so that's many hundreds of millions of people. The majority of whom are likely in the most developed countries in the US and across Europe, that's going to create a lot of political pressure on those in those countries. So in order to have a global system that works it feels like you need it to work at the global level but then you also need individuals in each of the member nations in that system to feel like it's working for them too. And that recurses all the way down so in local cities and communities people need to feel like it's working for them both economically and socially. So I guess at this point the thing that I worry about and I've rotated a lot of Facebook's energy to try to focus on this is you know our mission used to be connecting the world. Now it's about helping people build communities and bringing people closer together and a lot of that is because I actually think that the thing that we need to do to support more global connection at this point is making sure that things work for people locally. That you know a lot of ways we've made it so the internet you know so that an emerging creator can... But how do you balance working it locally for people in the American Midwest and at the same time working it better for people in Mexico or South America or Africa? I mean part of the imbalance is that when people in middle America are angry everybody pays attention because they have their finger on the button but if people in Mexico or people in Zambia feel angry we care for less because they have far less power. The pain and I'm not saying the pain is not real the pain is definitely real but the pain of somebody in Indiana is reverberates around the world far more than the pain of somebody in Honduras or in the Philippines simply because of the imbalances of the power in the world and earlier what we said about fragmentation I noted Facebook faces a lot of criticism about kind of encouraging people some people to move to these extremist groups but that's a big problem but I don't think it's the main problem I think also it's something that you can solve if you put enough enough energy into that that is something you can solve and but this is the problem that gets most of the attention now what I worry more and not just about Facebook about the entire direction that the new internet economy and the new tech economies is going towards is increasing inequality between different parts of the world which is not the result of extremist ideology but the results of a certain economic and political model and secondly undermining um human agency and undermining the the the basic philosophical ideas of democracy and the free market and individualism these I would say that my two greatest concerns about the development of technology like like AI and machine learning and this is this is this is this will continue to be a major problem even if we find solutions to the issue of social extremism in particular groups yeah I certainly agree that that extremism isn't is I would think about it more as a symptom and a big issue that needs to be worked on but um but but I think the bigger question is making sure that everyone has a sense of purpose has a role that they feel matters um and social connections because at the end of the day we're social animals and I think it's easy in our in our theoretical thinking to um to abstract that away but but that's um that's such a fundamental part of of of who we are so that's why I focus on that um I don't do you want to move over to some of the AI issues because I think that that's uh um or do you want to stick on this topic for a second no I mean this topic is closely connected to to AI um again because I think that you know one of the these services that science fiction and I'm a huge fan of science fiction but I think it has done some some also some some pretty bad things which is to focus attention on the wrong the wrong scenarios and the wrong dangers that people think oh AI is dangerous because the robots are coming to kill us and this is extremely unlikely uh that will will face a robot rebellion I'm much more frightened about robots always obeying orders than about robots rebelling uh against against the humans I think the two main problems with AI and we can explore this in in greater depth is what I just mentioned first increasing inequality between different parts of the world because you'll have some countries which uh lead and dominate the new AI economy and this is such a huge advantage that it kind of trumps everything else and we will see I mean if we had the industrial revolution creating this huge gap between a few industrial powers and everybody else and then it took 150 years to close the gap and over the last few decades the gap has been closed or closing as more and more countries which are far behind are catching up now the gap may reopen and be much worse than ever before because of the rise of AI and because AI is likely to be dominated by just a small number of countries so that's one issue AI inequality and the other issue is AI and human agency or even the meaning of human life what happens when AI is mature enough and you have enough data to basically hack human beings and you have an AI that knows me better than I know myself and can uh make decisions for me predict my choices manipulate my choices and authority increasingly shifts from humans to algorithms so not only decisions about which movie to see but even decisions like which community to join uh who to befriend whom to marry we increasingly rely on the recommendations of the AI and what does it do to human life and human agency so these are the two most important issues of AI inequality and AI and human agency yeah and I think both of them get down to a similar question around values right and who's building this and what are the values that are encoded and how does that end up playing out um yeah I tend to think that in a lot of the conversations around AI we almost personify AI right your point around killer robots or something like that but but I actually think it's AI is very connected to the general tech sector right so almost every technology product and increasingly a lot of um not what you call technology products um have are made better in some way by AI so it's not like AI is a monolithic thing that you build it's it it powers a lot of products so it's a lot of economic progress and can get towards some of the the distribution of of opportunity questions that you're raising um but it also is fundamentally interconnected with um with these really socially important questions around data um and privacy and and how we want our data to be used and what are the policies around that and what are the the global frameworks um and so one of the big questions that so I tend to agree with a lot of the um the the questions that you're raising which is that a lot of the countries that have the ability to invest in future technology of which AI and data and and future internet technologies are certainly an important area are doing that because it will give you know their local companies um an advantage in the future right and to be the ones that are exporting services um around the world um and I tend to think that right now um you know the United States has a a major um advantage that a lot of the global technology platforms um are made here and you know certainly a lot of the the values that are encoded in that um are shaped largely by by American values they're not only I mean we and I speaking for Facebook and we serve people around the world and we take that very seriously but you know certainly ideas like giving everyone a voice um that's something that um is probably very shaped by the um by the American ideas around free speech and and strong adherence to that um so I think culturally and economically um there's an advantage to for for countries to develop um to to kind of push forward the state of of of the field and um and and have the the companies that in the next generation are the the strongest companies in that so certainly you see different countries um trying to do that and this is very tied up in um in not just economic prosperity and inequality but also do they have a real chance I mean does a country like Honduras, Ukraine, Yemen has any real chance of joining the AI race or are they already they are already out I mean that they are it's not going to happen in Yemen it's not going to happen in Honduras and then what happens to them in 20 years or 50 years. Oh my this gets down to the values around how it's developed though right is um you know I think that there are certain advantages that countries with larger populations have because you can get to critical mass in terms of universities and industry and and and investment and things like that but one of the values um that we hear right both at Facebook and I think generally the the academic system of trying to do research hold is is that you do open research right so a lot of the work that's getting invested into um into these advances in theory if this works well should be more open so then you can have an entrepreneur um in one of these countries that you're talking about which you know maybe isn't isn't a whole industry wide thing and um you know certainly I think you'd bet against you know sitting here today that in the future all of the AI companies are going to be in a in a given small country but I don't think it's far fetched to believe that there will be an entrepreneur in some place who can use amazon web services to spin up instances for compute who can hire people across the world in a globalized economy and can leverage research that has been done in the US or across Europe or in different open academic institutions or companies that increasingly are publishing their work um that are pushing the state of the art forward on that so I think that there's this big question about what we want the future to look like and part of the way that I think we want the future to look is we want it to be um we want it to be open we want the research to be open I think we want the internet to be a platform and this gets back to your unification point versus fragmentation one of the big risks I think for the future is that the um the internet policy in each country ends up looking different and ends up being fragmented and if that's the case then I think the entrepreneur in the countries that you're talking about in Honduras probably doesn't have as big of a chance if they can't leverage the um the um all the advances that are happening everywhere but if the internet state is one thing and the research state is open then I think that they have a much better shot so when I look towards the future one of the things that I that I just get very worried about is the values that I just laid out are not values that all countries share and when you get into some of the more authoritarian countries and their data policies they're very different from the kind of regulatory frameworks that um that across Europe and and across a lot of other people people are talking about or have put into place and um you know just to put a finer point on it and recently I've come out and I've been very vocal that I think that more countries should adopt um a privacy framework like GDPR in Europe and a lot of people I think have been confused about this they're like why are you arguing for for more privacy regulation um you know why now given that in the past you um you you weren't as positive on it and I think part of the reason why why I am so focused on this now is I think at this point people around the world recognize that these questions around data and AI and technology are important so there's going to be a framework in every country I mean it's not like there's not going to be regulation or policy so I actually think the bigger question is what is it going to be and the most likely alternative to um to each country adopting something that that encodes the freedoms and rights of something like GDPR in my mind the most likely alternative is the authoritarian model which is is currently being spread which says you know as every company needs to store everyone's data locally in data centers and you know if I'm a government I should be able to you know go send my military there and be able to access whatever data I want and be able to take that for surveillance or military or or helping you know local military industrial companies and I mean I just think that that's a really bad future right that's not that's not the direction that um that I as as you know someone who's building one of these internet services or just as a citizen of the world want to see the world go in yeah to be the devil's advocate for for a moment I mean if I look at it from the viewpoint let's say of India so I listened to the American president saying America first and the in I'm a nationalist I'm not a globalist I care about the interests of America and I wonder is it safe to store the data about Indian citizens in the US and not in India when they're openly saying they care only about themselves so why should it be in America and not in India well I think that there's the the motives matter and certainly I don't think that that either of us would consider India to be an authoritarian country that that has so so I would say that it can still say we want data and metadata on Indian users to be stored on Indian soil we don't want it to be stored in on American soil or somewhere else yeah and I can understand the the arguments for that and I think that there's the intent matters right and I think countries can come at this with with open values and and and and still conclude that something like that could be helpful but I think one of the things that you need to be very careful about is that if you set that precedent you're making it very easy for other countries that don't have open values and that are much more authoritarian and and want the data not to not to protect their citizens but to be able to surveil them and and find dissidents and and lock them up that so I think I agree I think that it really boils down to the questions that do we trust America and given the past two three years people in more and more places around the world and previously say if we were sitting here 10 years ago 20 years ago or 40 years ago then America declared itself to be the leader of the free world we can argue a lot whether this was the case or not or at least on the on the on the declaratory level this was how America presented itself to the world we are the leaders of the free world so trust us we care about freedom but now we see a different America America which doesn't want even to be again it's not a question of if on what they do but how America present itself no longer as the leader of the free world but as a country which is interested above all in itself and in its own interests and just this morning for instance I read that the US is considering having a veto on the UN resolution against using sexual violence as a weapon of war and the US is is the one that thinks of that vetoing this and as somebody who is not a citizen of the US I ask myself can I still trust America to be the leader of the of the free world if America itself says I don't want this role anymore well I think that that's a somewhat separate question from the the direction that the internet goes in because I mean GDPR the framework that that I'm advocating that it would be better if more country is adopted something like this because I think that that's just significantly better than the alternatives a lot of which are these more authoritarian models I mean GDPR originated in Europe right so that's it's not an American invention and I think in general these these values of openness and research of of cross-border flow of ideas and and trade that's not an American idea right I mean that's that's a global philosophy for how the world should work and I think that the alternatives to that are at best fragmentation right which breaks down the global model on this at worst a growth in an authoritarianism for the models of how this gets gets adopted and um and that's where I think that the precedents on some of the stuff get really tricky and you can you're I think doing a good job of playing devil's advocate in the conversation because you're you're you're bringing all of the counter arguments that I think someone with good intent might bring to argue hey maybe um maybe a different set of data policies is something that we should consider the thing that I just worry about is that what we've seen is that once a country puts that in place that's a precedent that then a lot of other countries that might be more authoritarian use to to basically be a precedent to argue that they should do the same things and and then that spreads and and I think that that's bad right and that's that's one of the things that that that is is the the person running this company I'm quite committed to making sure that we play our part um and pushing back on that and keeping the internet as as one platform so I mean one of the most important decisions that I think I get to make is is the person running this company is where are we going to build our data centers and store and store data and and we've made the decision that we're not going to put data centers in countries that we think have weak rule of law um that uh where people's data may be improperly accessed um and that could put people in harm's way and you know a lot has been there have been a lot of questions around the world around questions of of censorship and I think that those are really serious and important I mean I a lot of the reason why I build what we build is because I care about giving everyone a voice giving people as much voice as possible I don't want people to be to be censored um at some level these questions around data and how it's used and whether uh authoritarian governments get access to it I think are even more sensitive because though because if you can't say something that you want that is is highly problematic that violates your your human rights I think in a lot of cases um it it stops progress but um but if if a government can get access to your data then it can identify who you are and go lock you up um and hurt you and hurt your family um and cause real physical harm in ways that are just really deep so I do think that that um that people running these companies have an obligation um to try to push back on that um and and and fight uh establishing precedence which will be harmful um even if if a lot of the initial countries that are that are talking about some of this um have good intent I think that this can easily go off the rails and when you when you talk about in the future um AI and and data which are two concepts that are just really tied together um I I just think the value is that that comes from and whether it's part of a more global system a more democratic process a more open process that's one of our best hopes for for having this work out well if it's if it comes from um repressive or authoritarian countries then um that I I just think that that's going to be highly problematic in a lot in a lot of ways yeah that raises the question of how do we how do we build AI in such a way that it's not inherently a tool of surveillance and manipulation and control I mean this goes back to the idea of creating something that knows you better than you know yourself which is kind of the the ultimate surveillance and control tool and we are building it now in in in different places around the world it's being built and what are your thoughts about how to build an AI which serves individual people and protects individual people and not an AI which can easily with a flip of a switch becomes kind of the ultimate surveillance tool well I think that that is more about the values and the policy framework than than the technological development I mean it's a lot of the research that's happening in AI are just very fundamental mathematical methods um where you know a researcher will will create an advance and now um all of the neural networks will be three percent more efficient I'm just kind of throwing this out and and that means that all right you know news feed will be a little bit better for people our systems for detecting things like hate speech will be a little bit better but it's you know our ability to to to find photos of you that you might want to review will be better but but all these systems get get a little bit better so now I think the the bigger question is you you have places in the world where governments are choosing to use that technology and those advances for things like widespread face recognition and surveillance and those countries I mean China is doing this they create a real feedback loop which advances the state of that technology where you know they say okay well we want to do this so now there's a set of companies that are sanctioned to to go do that and have are getting access to a lot of data to do it because it's it's allowed and encouraged so so that that is advancing and getting better and better it's not that's not a mathematical process that's a that's kind of a policy process that they want to go in that direction those the values and it's an economic process of the feedback loop and development of those things compared to in countries that might say hey that kind of surveillance isn't what we want those companies just don't exist as much right or don't get as much support I mean my home country of Israel is at least for Jews it's a democracy and it's one of the leaders of the world in surveillance technology and we basically have one of the biggest laboratories of surveillance technology in the world which is the occupied territories and exactly these kinds of systems are being developed there and exported all over the world so again given my personal experience back home again I don't I don't necessarily trust that just because a society in its own inner workings is say democratic that it will not develop and spread these kinds of technologies yeah I agree it's not clear that a democratic process alone solves it but I do think that it is mostly a policy question where it's you know a government can quite easily make the decision that they don't want to support that kind of surveillance and then the companies that they would be working with to support that kind of surveillance would be out of business and and then or the very least have much less economic incentive to continue that that technological progress so so that dimension of of the growth of the technology gets stunted compared to others and that's generally the process that I think you want to follow broadly right so technological advance isn't by itself good or bad I think it's the job of the people who are shepherding it building it and making policies around it to have policies and make sure that their effort goes towards amplifying the good and mitigating the negative use cases and and that's how I think you end up bending these industries and these technologies to be things that are that are positive for humanity overall and I think that that's a normal process that happens with most technologies that that get built but but I think what we're seeing in some of these places is is not the natural mitigation of negative uses in some cases the economic feedback loop is is pushing those things forward but I don't think it has to be that way but I think that that's not as much a technological decision as it is a policy decision I fully agree but I mean it's every technology can be used in different ways for good or for bad you can you can use the radio to broadcast music to people and you can use the radio to broadcast Hitler giving a speech to millions of Germans the radio doesn't care the radio just carries whatever whatever you put in it so yeah it is a policy decision but then it's just raises the question how do we make sure that the policies are the right policies in a world when it is becoming more and more easy to manipulate and control people on a massive scale like like never before I mean the new technology it's not just that we invented technology and then we have good democratic countries and bad authoritarian countries and the question is what do they do with the technology the technology itself could change the balance of power between democratic and totalitarian systems yeah and I fear that the new technologies are inherent are giving an inherent advantage not necessarily overwhelming but they they do tend to give an inherent advantage to totalitarian regimes because the the biggest problem of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century which eventually led to their downfall is that they couldn't process the information efficiently enough if you think about the Soviet Union so you have this model and an information processing model which basically says we take all the information from the entire country move it to one place to Moscow there it gets processed decisions are made in one place and transmitted back as commands this was the the Soviet model of information processing and versus the American version which was no we don't have a single center we have a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals and businesses and they can make their own decisions in the Soviet Union there is somebody in Moscow if I live on in some small farm or Kolkhoz in Ukraine there is somebody in Moscow who tells me how many radishes to grow this year because they know and in America I decide for myself with you know I get signals from the market and I decide and the Soviet model just didn't work well because of the difficulty of processing so much information quickly in with with 1950s technology and this is one of the main reasons why the Soviet Union lost the Cold War to the United States but with the new technology it suddenly it might become it's not certain but one of my fears is that the new technology suddenly makes central information processing far more efficient than ever before and far more efficient than distributed data processing because the more data you have in one place the better your algorithms and and and so on and so forth and this kind of tilts the balance between totalitarianism and democracy in favor of totalitarianism and I wonder what are your thoughts on on on on this issue well I'm more optimistic about about democracy and this I mean I think the way that the democratic process needs to work is people start talking about these problems and then even if it seems like it starts slowly in terms of people caring about data issues and technology policy because it's a lot harder to get everyone to care about it than it is just a small number of decision makers so I think that the history of democracy versus more totalitarian systems is it always seems like the totalitarian systems are going to be more efficient and the democracies are just going to get left behind but you know smart people you know people start discussing these issues and caring about them and I do think we see that people do now care much more about their own privacy about data issues about the technology industry people are becoming more sophisticated about this they realize that that having a lot of your data stored can both be an asset because it can help provide a lot of benefits and services to you but increasingly maybe it's also a liability because there are hackers and nation states who might be able to break in and use that data against you or or exploit it or reveal it so maybe people don't want their their data to be stored forever maybe they want the to be reduced in permanence maybe they want it all to be intended encrypted as much as possible in their private communications people really care about this stuff in a way that they they didn't before and that's certainly over the last several years that's grown a lot so I think that that conversation is the normal democratic process and I think what's going to end up happening is that by the time you get people broadly aware of the issues and on board that is just a much more powerful approach where then you do have people in a decentralized system who are capable of making decisions who are smart who I think will generally always do it better than than than two centralized approach and here is again a place where I worry that personifying AI and saying AI is a thing right that that an institution will develop and it's almost like a sentient being I think mischaracterizes what it actually is right it's it's a set of methods that make everything better or like sorry that's sorry let me let me retract that it's that that's way too broad it's a lot of technological processes more efficient and and I think that that's um but but that's the worry it makes not just for that's not just for centralized folks where it's I mean in in in our context you know so we build our business is this ad platform and a lot of the way that that can be used now is we have 90 million small businesses that use our tools and now because of this access to technology they have access to the same tools to do advertising and marketing and reach new customers and grow jobs that previously only the big companies would have had and um and that's um that's a big advance and that that's that's a massive decentralization when people talk about our company and the internet platforms overall they talk about how there's a small number of companies that are big and that's true but the flip side of it is that now there are billions of people around the world who have a voice that they can share information more broadly and that's actually a massive decentralization and power and and and kind of returning power to people similarly people have access to more information have access to to more commerce that's that's all positive so I don't know I I'm I'm an optimist on this I think we have real work cut out for us and I think that the challenges that you raise are the right ones to be thinking about because if we get it wrong um that's the way in which I think it will go wrong um but I don't know I think that the historical precedent would say that at all points you know whether it was the competition with between the US and Japan and the 80s and the 70s or the the Cold War before that are different other times people always thought that the democratic model which is slow to mobilize but but um the very strong once it does and once people get get get bought into a direction and understand the issue um I do think that that will continue to be the best way to spread prosperity around the world and make progress in a way that um that that meets people's needs and that's why you know when we're talking about internet policy when you're talking about economic policy I think spreading regulatory frameworks that encode those values I think is one of the most important things that we can do but it starts with raising the issues that you are and having people be aware of the potential problems yeah I agree that in the last few decades it was the case that open democratic systems were were better and and and more efficient and this I I'm again one of my fears is that it might have made us a bit complacent because we assume that this is kind of a law of nature that distributed systems are always better and more efficient than centralized process than centralized systems and we lived we grew up in a world in which there was kind of this to do the good thing morally was also to do the efficient thing economically and politically and a lot of countries liberalized their economy their society their politics over the last 50 years more because they were convinced of the efficiency argument than of the deep moral argument and what happens if efficiency and morality suddenly split which have happened before in history I mean the last 50 years are not representative of the whole of history we had many cases before in human history in which repressive centralized systems were more efficient and therefore you got these repressive empires and there is no law of nature which says that this cannot happen again and again my fear is that the new technology might tilt that balance and just by making central data processing far more efficient it could give a boost to totalitarian regimes also in the balance of power between say again the center and the individual that for most of history the central authority could not really know you personally simply because of the inability to to gather and process the information so there were some people who knew you very well but usually their interests were aligned with yours like my mother knows me very well but most of the time I can trust my mother but now we are reaching a point when some system fell away can know me better than my mother and the interests are not necessarily aligned now yes we can use that also for good but what I'm pointing out that this is a kind of power that never existed before and it could empower totalitarian and authoritarian regimes to do things that were simply technically impossible until today and you know if you live in an open democracy so okay you can rely on all kinds of mechanisms to protect yourself but thinking more globally about this issue I think a key question is how do you protect human attention from being hijacked by malevolent players who know you better than you know yourself who know you better than your mother knows you and this is a question that we never had to face before because we never had usually the malevolent players just didn't know me very well yeah okay so there's a lot in what you were just talking about I mean I think um in general one of the things that I do think that there is a scale effect where one of the best things that we could do to to if we care about these open values and having a globally connected world I think making sure that the critical mass of the investment in new technologies encodes those values is really important so that's one of the reasons why I care a lot about not not supporting the spread of authoritarian policies to more countries and either inadvertently doing that or setting precedents that that enable that to happen because I think the more development that happens in the way that is more open where the research is more open where where people have the the the where the policy making around it is is more democratic I think that's going to be positive so I think kind of maintaining that balance ends up being really important um and one of the reasons why I think democratic countries over time tend to do better on on serving what people want is because there's no metric to optimize the society right it's like a when you talk about efficiency a lot of what people are talking about is economic efficiency right am I are we increasing gdp or we increasing jobs or we decreasing poverty and those things are all good but I think part of what the democratic process does is people get to decide on their own which of the dimensions in society matter the most to them but if you can if you can manipulate if you can hijack people's attention and manipulate them then people deciding on their own just doesn't help because I don't realize it that somebody manipulated me to think that this is what I want if and we are reaching the point when for the first time in history you can do that on a massive scale so again I speak a lot about the issue of free will in in this regard and the people that are easiest to manipulate are the people who believe in free will and will simply identify with whatever thought or desire pops up in their mind because they cannot even imagine that this desire is not the result of my free will this desire is the result of some external manipulation now it may sound paranoid and for most of history it was probably paranoid because nobody had this kind of ability to do it on a massive scale but here like in silicon valley the tools to do that on a massive scale have been developed over the last few decades and they may have been developed with the best intentions some of them may have been developed with the intention of just selling stuff to people and selling products to people but now the same tools that can be used to sell me something I don't really need can now be used to sell me a politician I really don't need or an ideology that I really don't need it's the same tool that's the same hacking the human animal and manipulating what's happening inside yeah okay so there's there's a lot there's a lot going on here I think that there's when designing these systems I think that there's the intrinsic design which you want to make sure that you get right and then there's preventing abuse which I think is something that there's there's two types of questions that people raise and one is you know we saw what the you know Russian government tried to do in the 2016 election that is that's clear abuse we need to build up really advanced systems for detecting that kind of interference in the democratic process and more broadly being able to identify that identify when you know people are standing up networks of fake accounts that are not behaving in a way that normal people would to be able to weed those out and work with law enforcement and election commissions and folks all around the world and intelligence community to be able to coordinate and be able to deal with that effectively so stopping abuse is certainly important but I would argue that the even more the deeper question is about the intrinsic design of the systems right so not not not just fighting the abuse in there I think that I think that the incentives are more aligned towards a good outcome than a lot of critics might say and here's why I think that there's a difference between what people want first order and what they want you know second order over time right it's so right now you might just consume a video because you think it's silly or fun and you know you you wake up and or you kind of look up an hour later and you've you've watched a bunch of videos and you're like well what happened to my time and okay so maybe in the narrow short term period you you consume some more content and and maybe you saw some more ads so it seems like it's good for the business but it actually really isn't over time because people make decisions based on what they find valuable and what we find at least in in our work is that what people really want to do is connect with other people right it's it's not just passively consume content it's so we've had to find and constantly adjust our systems over time to make sure that that we're rebalancing it's that way you're interacting with people so that way we make sure that we don't just measure systems in this in the signals in the system like what are you clicking on because that you know that could get you into a bad local optimum but instead we bring in real people to tell us what their real experiences in words right not not just kind of filling out scores but also telling us you know where what were the most meaningful experiences you had today what what content was the most important what interaction did you have with a friend that mattered to you the most and was that connected to something that we did and and if not then then we go and try to do the work to figure out how we can facilitate that and what we find is that yeah in the near term maybe showing some people some some more viral videos might increase time right but over the long term it doesn't it's not actually aligned with with with our business interest or the long-term social interest so in it kind of in strategy terms that would be a stupid thing to do and now I think a lot of people think that businesses are just very short-term oriented and that we only care about people think that businesses only care about the next you know quarter profit but but I think that most businesses that that that get run well that's just not the case and you know I think last year on one of our earnings calls you know I told investors that we'd actually reduce the amount of video watching that quarter by 50 million hours a day because we wanted to take down the amount of viral videos that people were seeing because we thought that that was displacing more meaningful interactions that people were having with other people which in the near term might have a short-term impact on the business for that quarter but but over the long term I would be more positive both for how people feel about the products and for the business and in one of the patterns that I think has actually been quite inspiring or a cause of optimism in running a business is that oftentimes you make decisions that you think are going to pay off long down the road right so you think okay I'm doing the right thing long term but it's going to hurt for a while and I almost always find the long term comes sooner than you think and and that when you make these decisions that they're maybe taking some pain in the near term in order to get to what will be a better case down the line that better case maybe you think it'll take five years but but actually it ends up coming in you know a year right and I think people at some deep level know when something is good and and and like and and I guess this gets back to the democratic values because at some level I trust that people have a sense of what they actually care about and it may be that you know if we were showing more viral videos maybe that would be better than the alternatives that they have to do right now right I mean maybe that's better than what's on tv because at least they're personalized videos you know maybe it's better than the youtube if we're we have better content or whatever the reason is but but I think you can still make the service better over time for actually matching what people want and if you do that that is going to be better for everyone so I do think the intrinsic design of these systems is quite aligned with with serving people in a way that is pro-social and and that's certainly what I care about and running this company is to get there yeah I think this is like the rock bottom that this is the most important issue that ultimately what I'm hearing from you and from many other people when I have these discussions is ultimately the customer is always right the voter knows best people know deep down people know what is good for them people make a choice if they choose to do it then it's good that's that's and that's that has been the bedrock of at least you know western democracies for centuries for generations and this is now where the the big question mark is is it still true in a world where we have the technology to hack human beings and manipulate them like never before that the customer is always right that the voter knows best or have we gone past this point and we can know I mean and and the simple ultimate answer that well this is what people want and and and they know what's good for them maybe it's no longer the case well yeah I think that the it's it's not clear to me that that has changed but I think that that's that's a very deep question I don't think that that's a new question I mean I think it's people have always no the question is that the technology is new I mean if you lived in 19th century America and you didn't have these extremely powerful tools to decipher and influence people well it was a different let me actually frame this a different way okay which is I actually think you know for all the talk around is democracy being hurt by by the the current set of tools and the media and and and all this I actually think that there's an argument the world is significantly more democratic now than it was in the past I mean the the country was set up as the US was set up as a republic right so a lot of the the foundational rules limited the power of a lot of individuals being able to vote and have a voice and checked the popular will in a lot of different stages everything from the way that laws get written by congress right and not by by people you know so to everything to the electoral college and which which a lot of people think today is is undemocratic but I mean but it was put in place because of of of a set of values that that a democratic republic would be better I actually think what has happened today is that increasingly more people are enfranchised and more people have a voice more people have are getting the vote but increasingly people have a voice more people have access to information and I think a lot of what people are asking is is that good it's it's not necessarily the question of okay the democratic process has been the same but now the technology is different I think the technology has made it so individuals are more empowered and part of the question is is that the world that we want and I again this is an area where it's it's not that I mean all these things are with challenges right and and and often progress causes a lot of issues and it's it's a really hard thing to reason through wow we're trying to make progress and and help all these people join the the the global economy or help people join the communities and have the social lives that they would want and be accepted in different ways but it comes with this dislocation in the near term and that's a massive dislocations that seems really painful but but I actually think that you can make a case that we are at and continue and continue to be at the most democratic time and I think that overall in the history of our country at least when we've gotten more people to have the vote and we've gotten more representation and we've made it so people have access to more information and more people can share their experiences I do think that that's made the country stronger and has um and has helped progress and it's not that the stuff is without is without issues it has massive issues but that's at least the pattern that I see and why I'm optimistic about about a lot of the work I agree that more people have more voice than ever before both in the U.S. and globally that's I think you're absolutely right my concern is to what extent we can trust the voice of people to what extent I can trust my voice like I'm we have this picture of the world that I have this voice inside me which tells me what is right and what is wrong and the more I'm able to express this voice in the outside world and influence what's happening and the more people can express their voices it's it's better it's more democratic but what happens if at the same time that more people can express their voices it's also easier to manipulate your inner voice to what extent you can really trust that the thought that just popped up popped up in your mind is the result of some free will and not the result of an extremely powerful algorithm that understands what's happening inside you and knows how to push the buttons and press the levers and is serving some external entity and it has planted this thought or this desire that you now express so it's two different issues or giving people voice and trusting and again I'm not saying I know everything but all these these people that now joins the conversation we cannot trust their voices I'm asking this about myself to what extent I can trust my own inner voice and you know I spend two hours meditating every day and I go on these long meditation retreats and my main takeaway from that is it's craziness inside there and it's so complicated and the the the simple naive belief that the thought that pops up in my mind this is my free will this is this was never the case but if say a thousand years ago the battles inside were mostly between you know neurons and biochemicals and childhood memories and and and all that increasingly you have external actors going under your skin and into into your brain and into your mind and how do I trust that my amygdala is not a russian agent now how do I know the more we understand about the extremely complex world inside us the less easy it is to simply trust what this inner voice is is telling is saying yeah I understand the the point that you're making as one of the people who's running a company that develops ranking systems to try to help show people content that's going to be interested into them I there's a dissonance between the way that you're explaining what you think is possible and what I see as a as a as a practitioner building this I think you can build systems that can get good at at a very specific thing right at helping to you know understand which of your friends you care the most about so you can rank their content higher in newsfeed but the idea that there's some kind of generalized AI that's a monolithic thing that understands all dimensions of of of who you are in a way that's that's deeper than you do I think doesn't exist and is probably quite far off from existing so there's certainly abuse of the systems that I think needs to be that I think is more of a policy and values question which is you know on Facebook you're supposed to be your your real identity so if you have to use your example Russian agents or folks from the government with the IRA who are posing as someone else and and saying something and you see that content but you think it's coming from someone else then that's not an algorithm issue I mean that's that's someone abusing the system and taking advantage of the fact that you trust that on on on this platform someone is generally going to be who they say they are so you can trust that the information is coming from someplace and and kind of slipping in the back door that way and that's the thing that we certainly need to go fight but I don't know is a broad is a broad matter I do think that there's this question of to what degree are the systems and this kind of brings it full circle to where we started on on is it fragmentation or is it personalization is you know is is the content that you see if it resonates is that because it actually just more matches your interests or is it because you're being incepted and convinced of something that you don't actually believe and doesn't it is dissonant with your your interests and your beliefs and certainly all the psychological research that that that I've seen and the experience that that we've had is that when people see things that don't match what they believe they just ignore it right so so certainly there's there's a there can be an evolution that happens where you know a system shows information that you're going to be interested in and if that's not managed well that can that has the risk of pushing you down a path towards adopting a more extreme position or evolving the way you think about it over time but but I think most of the the content it resonates with people because it resonates with their lived experience and to the extent that people are abusing that and and either trying to represent that there's someone who they're not or trying to take advantage of a bug in human psychology where we might be more prone to to an extremist idea that's our job in either policing the platform working with governments and and and different agencies and making sure that we design our systems and our recommendation systems to to not be promoting things that people might engage with in the near term but over the long term will regret and resent us for for having done that and I think it's in our interest to get that right and and and for a while I think we didn't understand the depth of some of the problems and challenges that we face there and there's certainly still a lot more to do and when you're up against nation states and they're very sophisticated they're going to keep on evolving their tactics but but the thing that I would that I think is really important is that the fundamental design of the systems I do think in our incentives are aligned with with helping people connect to the people they want have meaningful interactions not just getting people to to watch a bunch of content that they're going to resent later that they did that and certainly not making people have have more extreme or negative viewpoints than than than what they actually believe so maybe I can try and summarize my my view and that we have two distinct dangers coming out of the same technological tools we have the the easier danger to grasp which is of extreme totalitarian regimes of the kind we haven't seen before and this could happen in in different maybe not in the US but in in other countries that these tools you say that they I mean that these are abuses but in some countries this could become the norm that you are living from the moment you are born in this system that constantly monitors and surveils you and constantly kind of manipulates you from from a very early age to adopt particular ideas views habits so forth in a way which was never possible before and this is like the full flanged totalitarian dystopia which could be so effective that people would not evil resent it because it they will be completely aligned with with the the values or the ideals of the system it's not 1984 where you need to torture people all the time no if you have agents inside their brain you don't need the external secret police so that's that's one danger it's like the the full flanged totalitarianism then in places like the US the more immediate danger or or problem to think about is what is increasingly people refer to as surveillance capitalism that you have these systems that constantly interact with you and and come to to know you and it's all supposedly in your best interests to give you better recommendations and better advice so it starts with recommendation for which movie to watch and and well to go on vacation but as the system becomes better it gives you recommendation on what to study at college were to work ultimately whom to marry who to vote for which religion to join like join a community like you have all these religious communities this is the best religion for you for your type of personality Judaism night it won't work for you go with Zen Buddhism it's it's much it's a much better fit for your personality you would thank us in five years you would look back and you say this was an amazing recommendation thank you i saw so much in joys and Buddhism and again people will it will feel that this is aligned with their own best interests and and the system improves over time yeah there will be glitches not everybody will be happy all the time but what does it mean that all the most important decisions in my life are being taken by an external algorithm what does it mean in terms of human agency in terms of you know the meaning of life you know for thousands of years humans tended to view life as a drama of decision making like life is your journey you reach an intersection after intersection and you need to choose some decisions are small like what to eat for breakfast and some decisions are really big like whom to marry and all of almost all of art and all of religion is about that like almost everywhere whether it's a Shakespeare tragedy or a Hollywood comedy it's about the hero or heroine needing to make a big decision to be or not to be to marry x or to marry y and what does it mean to live in a world in which increasingly we rely on the recommendations of algorithms to make these decisions until we reach a point when we simply follow them all the time or most of the time and they make good recommendations i'm not saying that this is some abuse some something serious no it's there are good recommendations but i'm just we don't have a model for understanding what is the meaning of human life in such a situation well i think the biggest objection that i'd have to what to both of the ideas that you just raised is that we have access to a lot of different sources of information a lot of people to talk to about different things and it's not just like there's one set of recommendations or a single recommendation that gets to dominate what we do and that gets to be overwhelming either in the totalitarian or the the capitalist model of what you were what you were saying to the contrary i think people really don't like and are very distrustful when they feel like they're being told what to do or just have a single option one of the big questions that we've studied is how to address you know when there's a hoax or or clear misinformation and the most obvious thing that that would seem like you do intuitively is tell people hey this seems like it's wrong here is the other point of view that that that that is right or or at least you know if it's a polarized thing even if it's not clear what's what's wrong and what's right it's here's the other point of view you know if you're on on any given issue and that really doesn't work right so so what ends up happening is if you tell people that something is false but they believe it then they just end up not trusting you yeah right so so that that ends up not working if you frame two things as opposites right so if you say okay well you're a person who doesn't believe in there you're seeing content that about not believing in climate change so i'm just gonna show you the other perspective right here's something that argues that climate change is a thing um that actually just entrenched as you further because it's okay someone's trying to kind of control okay so so what ends up working right sociologically and psychologically the thing that that ends up actually being effective is giving people a range of choices so if you show not here's the other opinion and and with a judgment done on the on the piece of content that a person engaged with but instead you show a series of related articles right or content then people can kind of work out for themselves hey here's the range of different opinions or things that that exist on this topic and you know maybe i lean in one direction or the other but i'm kind of going to work out for myself where i want to be most people don't choose the most extreme thing and and people end up feeling like they're informed and can can make a good decision so at the end of the day i think that that's the the architecture and the responsibility that we have is to make sure that the work that we're doing gives people more choices that it's not a given a single opinion that can kind of dominate anyone's thinking but where you can you know connect to hundreds of different friends and even if most of your friends share your religion or your political ideology you're probably going to have five or ten percent of friends who come from a different background who have different ideas and at least that's getting in as well so you're getting a broader range of views so i think that these are really important questions and it's not like there's there's an answer that that is going to you know fully solve it one way one way or another but i think these are the right things to to talk through you know we've been going for 90 minutes so we probably should wrap up but but i think we have a lot of material to cover in the next one of these that hopefully we get to do it's some point in the future and thank you so much for for coming and joining and doing this this has been a really interesting series of important topics to to to discuss yeah so thank me for thank you for hosting me and for you know being open about these very difficult questions which i know that you know you being the the head of the of a global corporation i can just sit here and speak whatever i want but you have many more responsibilities on your head so i appreciate that that kind of you putting yourself on the firing line and and dealing with with these questions thanks all right thank you yeah