Interesting interview on the future and AI with Yuval Noah Harari.

Some good reflections from the comment section:

“If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions.”

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” – E.O. Wilson

“We are breaking down from cortisol overload and suffering from chronic stress disorders. Especially our children and teens. Advertising has always used the sympathetic nervous system to increase sales and now content IS advertising… everyone is competing for eyes on the screen, 24-7, by playing with our fight or flight response. I call it cortisol farming. And we’re tapped out.”

“Back in the 1970s the television signals went off the air by midnight and you had no choice but to rest from that constant technology input. You had to rest even if you wanted to see more TV shows and news. This allowed people to rest and sleep easily as there was no distractions. Now in 2024 I find it hard to shut off my devices and rest because my brain thinks it is missing out on possibly important information, no matter how I want to rest my brain is addicted to tech. This has disrupted my entire day and body rhythms so much I am contemplating getting rid of it all.”

“Corporations should be liable for the consequences of their algorithms.” That should be codified in federal, state, local and international law.”

The ironic tagline “We are on the verge of destroying ourselves” is a perfect example of cortisol farming…”

It’s ironic how he condemns the early catholic church and their authoritarian control over what the ‘truth’ is, and then immediately suggests a new implementation of that same kind of control, except now it would be done by people that he apparently would approve of.

“As an aside, I recently read a NewsGuard article about AI created/generated newsites (just over 1,000 identified by NewsGuard). The article draws attention to the fact that many reliable news sources have decided they do not want AI to be able to access their content. Thus, AI has trained itself on “junk news.” And the result: AI generated news that is full of conspiracy and misinformation. Further, chatbots are trained in a similar manner. This seems a likely reason for why the comment section on many platforms are full of nonsense.”