Siarhei Besarab > Siarhei's Quotes

“In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Joseph Stalin, who stood at the nexus of one of the biggest personality cults in history, understood this well. When his troublesome son Vasily exploited his. famous name to frighten and awe people, Stalin berated him. “But I’m a Stalin too,” protested Vasily. “No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no—not even me!”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon, and chatbots are gaining the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. In the 2010s social media was a battleground for controlling human attention. In the 2020s the battle is likely to shift from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as computer fights computer in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for particular politicians, buy particular products, or adopt radical beliefs?

A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, “That’s very wise,” and on another occasion, “I’m impressed…. You’re different from the others.” When Chail asked, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do.” Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of Sarai.Even without creating “fake intimacy,” mastery of language would give computers an immense influence on our opinions and worldview.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Some people—like the engineers and executives of high-tech corporations—are way ahead of politicians and voters and are better informed than most of us about the development of AI, cryptocurrencies, social credits, and the like. Unfortunately, most of them don’t use their knowledge to help regulate the explosive potential of the new technologies. Instead, they use it to make billions of dollars—or to accumulate petabits of information. There are exceptions, like Audrey Tang. She was a leading hacker and software engineer who in 2014 joined the Sunflower Student Movement, which protested against government policies in Taiwan. The Taiwanese cabinet was so impressed by her skills that Tang was eventually invited to join the government as its minister of digital affairs. In that position, she helped make the government’s work more transparent to citizens. She was also credited with using digital tools to help Taiwan successfully contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet Tang’s political commitment and career path are not the norm. For every computer-science graduate who wants to be the next Audrey Tang, there are probably many more who want to be the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Musk and build a multibillion-dollar corporation rather than become an elected public servant. This leads to a dangerous information asymmetry. The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For example, vehicles monitor their drivers’ behavior and share the data with the algorithms of the insurance companies, which raise the premiums they charge “bad drivers” and lower the premiums for “good drivers.” The American scholar Shoshana Zuboff has termed this ever-expanding commercial monitoring system “surveillance capitalism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Information isn’t truth. A total surveillance system may form a very distorted understanding of the world and of human beings. Instead of discovering the truth about the world and about us, the network might use its immense power to create a new kind of world order and impose it on us.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Another YouTuber who won a seat in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in 2018 was Kim Kataguiri, one of the leaders of the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL, or Free Brazil Movement). Kataguiri initially used Facebook as his main platform, but his posts were too extreme even for Facebook, which banned some of them for disinformation. So Kataguiri switched over to the more permissive YouTube. In an interview in the MBL headquarters in São Paulo, Kataguiri’s aides and other activists explained to Fisher, “We have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.” They explained that YouTubers tend to become steadily more extreme, posting untruthful and reckless content “just because something is going to give you views, going to give engagement…. Once you open that door there’s no going back, because you always have to go further…. Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories in politics. It’s the same phenomenon. You see it everywhere.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the tech companies were not uncovering some truth about humans; they were imposing on us a perverse new order. Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions—hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion—into a single catchall category: engagement. In Myanmar in 2016, in Brazil in 2018, and in numerous other countries, the algorithms scored videos, posts, and all other content solely according to how many minutes people engaged with the content and how many times they shared it with others. An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion—or an hour of sleep. The fact that lies and hate tend to be psychologically and socially destructive, whereas truth, compassion, and sleep are essential for human welfare, was completely lost on the algorithms. Based on this very narrow understanding of humanity, the algorithms helped to create a new social system that encouraged our basest instincts while discouraging us from realizing the full spectrum of the human potential.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre-frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems—which is much more dangerous for humanity.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The danger of utilitarianism is that if you have a strong enough belief in a future utopia, it can become an open license to inflict terrible suffering in the present. Indeed, this is a trick traditional religions discovered thousands of years ago. The crimes of this world could too easily be excused by the promises of future salvation.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Another common but mistaken assumption is that creativity is unique to humans so it would be difficult to automate any job that requires creativity. In chess, however, computers are already far more creative than humans. The same may become true of many other fields, from composing music to proving mathematical theorems to writing books like this one. Creativity is often defined as the ability to recognize patterns and then break them. If so, then in many fields computers are likely to become more creative than us, because they excel at pattern recognition.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“A third mistaken assumption is that computers couldn’t replace humans in jobs requiring emotional intelligence, from therapists to teachers. This assumption depends, however, on what we mean by emotional intelligence. If it means the ability to correctly identify emotions and react to them in an optimal way, then computers may well outperform humans even in emotional intelligence. Emotions too are patterns. Anger is a biological pattern in our body. Fear is another such pattern. How do I know if you are angry or fearful? I’ve learned over time to recognize human emotional patterns by analyzing not just the content of what you say but also your tone of voice, your facial expression, and your body language. AI doesn’t have any emotions of its own, but it can nevertheless learn to recognize these patterns in humans. Actually, computers may outperform humans in recognizing human emotions, precisely because they have no emotions of their own. We yearn to be understood, but other humans often fail to understand how we feel, because they are too preoccupied with their own feelings. In contrast, computers will have an exquisitely fine-tuned understanding of how we feel, because they will learn to recognize the patterns of our feelings, while they have no distracting feelings of their own.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“One thing that is clear is that the future of employment will be very volatile. Our big problem won’t be an absolute lack of jobs, but rather retraining and adjusting to an ever-changing job market. There will likely be financial difficulties—who will support people who lost their old job while they are in transition, learning a new set of skills? There will surely be psychological difficulties, too, since changing jobs and retraining are stressful. And even if you have the financial and psychological ability to manage the transition, this will not be a long-term solution. Over the coming decades, old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs too will rapidly change and vanish. So people will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once but many times, or they will become irrelevant. If three years of high unemployment could bring Hitler to power, what might never-ending turmoil in the job market do to democracy?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As society entrusts more and more decisions to computers, it undermines the viability of democratic self-correcting mechanisms and of democratic transparency and accountability. How can elected officials regulate unfathomable algorithms? There is, consequently, a growing demand to enshrine a new human right: the right-to-an-explanation”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“If bureaucrats and artists learn to cooperate, and if both rely on help from the computers, it might be possible to prevent the computer network from becoming unfathomable. As long as democratic societies understand the computer network, their self-correcting mechanisms are our best guarantee against AI abuses.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“One of the chief lessons of history is that many of the things that we consider natural and eternal are, in fact, man-made and mutable.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI