Yuval Noah Harari: 'How to safeguard your mind in the age of junk information' (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/K1OvbwY6GPM
Transcript: "The biggest misconception about information is that information is truth. Most information is not truth. The truth is a very rare and costly and expensive type of information. Let's think about images and portraits. Over the last 2000 years, people have created billions and billions of portraits of Jesus. And not a single one of them is an authentic depiction because we have no idea how Jesus looked like. There is not a single portrait made during his lifetime. And the Bible doesn't say a single word about how he looked like. It's very easy to create fictional information because you don't need to research anything. You don't need evidence. You just come up with something and draw it. If you want to paint a truthful picture of anything of a person, of an economy, of a war, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money to research to make sure that you get it right. If we just flood the world with information and expect the truth to float up, it will not, it will sink" (Harari, Y. N., 2025). https://www.youtube.com/embed/K1OvbwY6GPM?start=495&end=576 Transcript: "A curious fact is that at least in the United States, there is already a legal path open for AIs to become legal persons. Corporations are considered legal persons that even have rights like freedom of speech. So for instance, it can open a bank account. Corporations open bank accounts, why can't the AI do it? It's a corporation. It can earn money and then it takes its money and invest it. And because it's so good at making investment decisions, it earned billions and billions. We could be in a situation when the richest person in the United States is not a human being. The richest person in the United States is an incorporated AI. So the legal and practical path to this situation is open. So what we are facing is not, you know, like a Hollywood science fiction scenario of one big evil computer trying to take over the world. No, it's nothing like that. It's more like millions and millions of AI bureaucrats that are given more and more authority to make decisions about us in banks, in armies, in governments. And again, there is good potential in that as well. They can provide us with the best healthcare in history. But there are of course huge risks. What happens if you can no longer understand why the bank refused to give you a loan? Why the government or the army did this or did that? When power shifts from organic humans to these alien inorganic AIs, it just becomes more and more difficult for us to understand the decisions that shape our life" (Harari, Y. N., 2025). https://www.youtube.com/embed/K1OvbwY6GPM?start=378&end=493 Bibliography: Harari, Y. N. (2025, August 11). 'How to safeguard your mind in the age of junk information'. Big Think; Freethink Media. https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/inorganic-intelligence/
