 Welcome to a conversation with Professor Yuval Noah Harari. My name is Julian Tett, I'm the US managing editor of the Financial Times. Now there are not many historians who would be put on the main stage of the Congress Centre of the World Economic Forum, sandwiched between Angela Merkel and Macron. I think there are even fewer who could fill the room almost as much as Angela Merkel. And almost none who would have the experience as we were waiting in the green room and Angela Merkel came through, Chancellor Merkel came through. She took care to stop, go up to Yuval and introduce herself and say, I've read your book. Pretty amazing. But Yuval Harari has written two very important books which have really shaped the debate, not just inside governments, but inside many businesses and many non-governmental organisations too. One of them, I imagine most of you read, sapiens. Hands up, who in the room has read sapiens? Okay, well, that is pretty impressive. His second book, Homo Deus, took those themes of sapiens, looking at the history of mankind, threw it into the future and looked at the issue of digital. He's got a third book coming out this summer, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is going to look at the present. But what he's going to be talking about today is something that actually Chancellor Merkel touched on in her own speech, which is a question of data. And what do we do about data today? His ideas are very provocative, very alarming and something that all of you should pay very close attention to now. Professor Harari, Professor Yuval, the floor is yours. Thank you. So, hello everybody. Let me just have one minute to get friends with this computer and make sure everything is okay. And can I have a bit more light on the audience so I can see the faces and not just speak to a darkness? Thank you. So, I want to talk to you today about the future of our species and really the future of life. We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. Because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. These will be the main products of the economy, of the 21st century economy. Not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds. Now, how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people who own the data. Those who control the data control the future, not just of humanity, but the future of life itself. Because today, data is the most important asset in the world. In ancient times, land was the most important asset. And if too much land became concentrated in too few hands, humanity split into aristocrats and commoners. Then in the modern age, in the last two centuries, machinery replaced land as the most important asset. And if too many of the machines became concentrated in too few hands, humanity split into classes, into capitalists and proletariats. Now, data is replacing machinery as the most important asset. And if too much of the data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split not into classes, it will split into species, into different species. Now, why is data so important? It's important because we've reached the point when we can hack not just computers, we can hack human beings and other organisms. There is a lot of talk these days about hacking computers and email accounts and bank accounts and mobile phones. But actually, we are gaining the ability to hack human beings. Now, what do you need in order to hack a human being? You need two things. You need a lot of computing power and you need a lot of data, especially biometric data. Not data about what I buy or where I go, but data about what is happening inside my body and inside my brain. Until today, nobody had the necessary computing power and the necessary data to hack humanity. Even if the Soviet KGB or the Spanish Inquisition followed you around everywhere 24 hours a day, watching everything you do, listening to everything you say, still they didn't have the computing power and the biological knowledge necessary to make sense of what was happening inside your body and brain and to understand how you feel and what you think and what you want. But this is now changing because of two simultaneous revolutions. On the one hand, advances in computer science and especially the rise of machine learning and AI are giving us the necessary computing power. And at the same time, advances in biology and especially in brain science are giving us the necessary understanding, biological understanding. You can really summarize 150 years of biological research since Charles Darwin in three words. Organisms are algorithms. This is the big insight of the modern life sciences that organisms, whether viruses or bananas or humans, they are really just biochemical algorithms. And we are learning how to decipher these algorithms. Now, when the two revolutions merge, when the infotech revolution merges with the biotech revolution, what you get is the ability to hack human beings. And maybe the most important invention for the merger of infotech and biotech is the biometric sensor that translates biochemical processes in the body and the brain into electronic signals that a computer can store and analyze. And once you have enough such biometric information and enough computing power, you can create algorithms that know me better than I know myself. And humans really don't know themselves very well. This is why algorithms have a real chance of getting to know ourselves better. We don't really know ourselves. To give an example, when I was 21, I finally realized that I was gay after living for several years in denial. And this is not exceptional. A lot of gay men live in denial for many years. They don't know something very important about themselves. Now imagine the situation in 10 or 20 years when an algorithm can tell any teenager exactly where he or she is on the gay-straight spectrum and even how malleable this position is. The algorithm tracks your eye movements, your blood pressure, your brain activity and tells you who you are. Now maybe you personally wouldn't like to make use of such an algorithm. But maybe you find yourself in some boring birthday party of somebody from your class at school and one of your friends has this wonderful idea that I've just heard about this cool new algorithm that tells you your sexual orientation and wouldn't it be very a lot of fun if everybody just takes turns testing themselves on this algorithm as everybody else is watching and commenting. What would you do? Would you just walk away? And even if you walk away and even if you keep hiding from your classmates or from yourself, you will not be able to hide from Amazon and Alibaba and the secret police. As you surf the internet, as you watch videos or check your social feed, the algorithms will be monitoring your eye movements, your blood pressure, your brain activity and they will know. They could tell Coca-Cola that if you want to sell this person some fuzzy sugary drink, don't use the advertisement with the shirtless girl. Use the advertisement with the shirtless guy. You wouldn't even know that this was happening, but they will know and this information will be worth billions. Once we have algorithms that can understand me better than I understand myself, they could predict my desires, manipulate my emotions and even take decisions on my behalf. And if we are not careful, the outcome might be the rise of digital dictatorships. In the 20th century, democracy generally outperformed dictatorship because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions. We are used to thinking about democracy and dictatorship in ethical or political terms, but actually these are two different methods to process information. Democracy processes information in a distributed way. It distributes the information and the power to make decisions between many institutions and individuals. Dictatorship, on the other hand, concentrates all information and power in one place. Now, given the technological conditions of the 20th century, distributed data processing worked better than centralized data processing, which is one of the main reasons why democracy outperformed dictatorship and why, for example, the US economy outperformed the Soviet economy. But this is true only under the unique technological conditions of the 20th century. In the 21st century, new technological revolutions, especially AI and machine learning might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. They might make centralized data processing far more efficient than distributed data processing. And if democracy cannot adapt to these new conditions, then humans will come to live under the rule of digital dictatorships. And already at present, we are seeing the formation of more and more sophisticated surveillance regimes throughout the world, not just by authoritarian regimes, but also by democratic governments. The US, for example, is building a global surveillance system while my home country of Israel is trying to build a total surveillance regime in the West Bank. But control of data might enable human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it. And if indeed we succeed in hacking and engineering life, this will be not just the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, this will be the greatest revolution in biology since the very beginning of life four billion years ago. For four billion years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life. All of life, for four billion years, dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, humans, all of life was subject to the laws of natural selections and to the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design, not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud, these are the new driving forces of evolution. And at the same time, science may enable life after being confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds, science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm. So after four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are entering the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design. This is why the ownership of data is so important. If we don't regulate it, a tiny elite may come to control not just the future of human societies, but the shape of life forms in the future. So how to regulate the data, the ownership of data? We have had 10,000 years of experience regulating the ownership of land. We have had a few centuries of experience regulating the ownership of industrial machinery, but we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently far more difficult because unlike land and unlike machinery, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It can move at the speed of light and you can create as many copies of it as you want. So does the data about my DNA, my brain, my body, my life, does it belong to me or to some corporation or to the government or perhaps to the human collective? At present, big corporations are holding much of the data and people are becoming worried about it, but mandating governments to nationalize the data may curb the power of the big corporations only in order to give rise to digital dictatorships. And politicians really, many politicians at least, are like musicians and the instrument they play on is the human emotional and biochemical system. A politician gives a speech and there is a wave of fear all over the country. A politician twits and there is an explosion of anger and hatred. Now I don't think we should give these musicians more sophisticated instruments to play on. And I certainly don't think they are ready to be entrusted with the future of life in the universe, especially as many politicians and governments seem incapable of producing meaningful visions for the future and instead what they sell the public are nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past. And as a historian, I can tell you two things about the past. First of all, it wasn't fun. You wouldn't like to really go back there. And secondly, it's not coming back. So nostalgic fantasies really are not a solution. So who should own the data? I frankly don't know. I think the discussion has just began. Most people when they hear the talk about regulating data they think about privacy, about shopping, about companies, corporations that know where I go and what I buy. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are much more important things at stake. So the discussion has hardly began and we cannot expect instant answers. We had better call upon our scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers and even our poets, or especially our poets to turn their attention to this big question. How do you regulate the ownership of data? The future, not just of humanity, but the future of life itself may depend on the answer to this question. Thank you. Well, thank you, Professor Harari, for an absolutely brilliant thought provoking, and it must be said somewhat challenging and depressing talk. I must say I'm quite starstruck sitting here witnessing to that stream of ideas. And I'd like to start with a very simple question, which is this. You paint this picture of a future that's quite scary. How soon do you expect that future to be here? Are we talking about two years, 20 years, 200 years? I mean, how soon could we be dealing with digital dictatorships? I think that the time scale is decades. I mean, in 200 years, I guess there won't be any sapiens left. There'll be something completely different. Two years, it's far too soon. So we were talking about a few decades, nobody knows exactly how many. Right, now you're unusual because you actually stood up on that stage and you said, I don't know what the answer is. Okay, that's not something you hear a lot at the World Economic Forum. It's admirably humble, but I'm curious. As you look around the world today, do you see any countries or any groups of people or any academic groups that seem to be having a sensible debate about this? Do you see any reason for encouragement at all? Well, I think that the world is divided into a very, very small group of people and institutions who understand what is happening and what is at stake. And the vast majority, not just of ordinary people, but even of politician and business people who are not really, I guess they hear about data, yeah, data protection, cyber attacks, somebody might steal my identity or my bank account details, but as I said, it's just the tip of the iceberg. I think that my guess, I don't know, but I guess that some of the big corporations like Google, like Facebook, the usual suspects, they understand what is at stake. I also think that some governments, especially the Chinese government, I think they understand what is at stake. I think most, certainly most humans have no idea. Right. Again, the thing is just to make it clear, it's the biometric data is the key. When people think about data, they mostly think about where I go, what I buy. When they think about hacking, they think about computers. They talk about AI, about machine learning. They forget the other side of the equation, which is the life sciences, the brain sciences. The brain sciences are giving us access to here. This is what we really try, we, what somebody is really trying to hack is this, not this. Right. I mean, China is interesting because I remember sitting at a table a few years ago in Davos with a senior Chinese official, who, and we were arguing about democracy, and he said, well, you and the West have democracy, we have social media. And the point was that Chinese government is using social media to not just monitor its citizens, but also act as a weather vane to gather information about what's happening in terms of public sentiment and ensure that they stay one inch ahead of that to stop any explosions. Do you see China as a place where this type of digital dictatorship is most likely to emerge? Well, I don't know. As I said, as I gave examples, you have cases in the West. And I know maybe best about my own country that Israel is building a real total surveillance regime in the West Bank, which is something we haven't seen anywhere, almost anywhere in history before, of really trying to follow every place, every individual. And we are still, we still haven't crossed the critical watershed of the biometric sensor. Whether it's in the US, in Israel, in China, it's still social media. It's still my mobile phone. It's still where I go, what you say make off my credit card. We still don't really have the technology to go inside, but we are maybe five years, 10 years away from having the technology. So maybe to give an extreme example, let's say you live in North Korea and you have to wear this bracelet, which constantly monitors what is happening inside your body. And you walk into a room and you see the picture of the dear leader on the wall and the bracelet can know what is happening to your brain, to your blood pressure, as you see this picture. So this really what is meant by a digital dictatorship. I mean, it makes 1984 sound positive. Charles Play. Charles Play, exactly. You say you don't know what to do about this, but imagine for a moment that you were dictator, be that digital or not. What would you do right now to help humanity deal with this? Would you like to just throw away all of those biometric devices? No, it's absolutely impossible to go back, especially in terms of technology and science. Even if one country or an entire continent is freaked out by the possibilities and they say we stop all research in this field, you can't force other countries to do the same. And then you have your own, I mean, you have a race, a race to the bottom, unless you have some global agreement on how to deal with this, then no country would like to stay behind in the race. So do you want the scientists to take control? Do you want the United Nations? Do you think the United Nations is people? No, as I said, I mean... The World Economic Forum, I mean, could all the people here take control of this, do you think? The discussion has just began. I don't think we should panic. We should just, first of all, be aware that this is what we are facing. And there are many possibilities, also technological possibilities, how, for example, I mean, when we talk about regulating ownership of land, we have a very clear picture of what it means. Okay, you have a plot, you have a field, you build a fence around, you have a gate, you stand at the gate and you say, okay, you can come in, you can't. That this is my field. Now, what does it mean in terms of the data about my DNA, or what's happening in my brain? I mean, what's the analogy of the fence and the gate? We just don't understand. So I think we are in an analogous position to where we were with the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, and you just need time. I mean, when you start a discussion, I know this from class, from university, you start a discussion and somebody raises the hand and says, okay, but what should I write in the test? And no, no, no, we are not there yet. We should first have a discussion about this. I don't have all the answers. Right. I mean, one thing I find fascinating in your description of the digital economy is that it actually involves a picture of society which is not quite the picture that normal economists have because most of the digital exchanges today don't actually involve money. People are giving up data in exchange for services. And that's something that no economic model can capture right now. And frankly, the legal models can't either in terms of the antitrust. So I'm curious, when you look at this problem, it's not quite economics. It's certainly not just computer science. It's not really any particular discipline. Do you think this means that universities need to rethink how they categorize academics? I mean, who is going to take this overarching view to try and talk about these issues? And I should say, I'm trained as an anthropologist. So I'd love to say the anthropologist, but I'm not waiting on them either. No, hopefully everybody. I mean, I think that today, if you're a computer scientist, you also need to be to some extent a philosopher and an anthropologist. It's now part of the business. And I think maybe again, to try and focus it, you talked about different exchanges in the world. Maybe the most important exchange in disrespect will be in healthcare. The big battle over what we today call privacy will be between privacy and health. Do you give access to what is happening inside your body and brain in exchange for far better healthcare? And my guess is that health will win hands down. People will give up their privacy in exchange for healthcare. And maybe in many places, they won't have a choice. I mean, they won't even get insurance if they are unwilling to give access to what is happening inside their bodies. Right, so another big exchange that will not involve money, but still be very, very important. Last quick question that we must wrap sadly. When it was all about land control, the elites essentially had feudalism. We called it feudalism in history. When it was all about the industrial machines, we had capitalism and Marxism. Have you thought of a word to describe this new world of dataism? Yeah, I try dataism, but I don't know. I mean, words have their own life and what word catches and what word doesn't, it's really a coincidence. Well, maybe answers on the postcard, if anyone in the hall has an idea, or tweet it out, or send them an email, or whatever digital communication you like. But anyway, on behalf of everyone here, I can see from the faces, people are actually not looking at their mobile phones. They're actually looking at you. They are wrapped. That is quite an achievement. And thank you very much indeed for both inspiring us and terrifying us. Thank you. Thank you, Julien. Thank you.