it's fascinating that feminism and communism and all these things happen in the 20th century. So many interesting things happen in the 20th century, so many movements, so many ideas, nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like it seems like a lot of stuff, like really quickly percolated, and it's accelerating. It's still accelerating. I mean, history is just accelerating, you know, for centuries and, uh, the 20th century, you know, we squeezed into it the things that previously took thousands of years. And now, I mean, we are squeezing it into decades, and you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived. Could be. I think, you know, our species, Homo sapiens, I don't think we'll be around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse, by giving too much power to AI that goes out out of our control. But if we survive, we'll probably have so much power that we will change ourselves.

using various technologies, so that our descendants will no longer be Homo sapiens like us. They will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals. Um, so maybe they'll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or sapiens historians like me. I think it's an extremely dangerous development, and the chances that this will go wrong, that this will, you know, people will use the new technologies trying to upgrade humans but actually downgrading them. This is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and armies and ruthless politicians change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering, it's very likely that they will try to enhance a few human qualities that they need like intelligence and discipline, while neglecting what are potentially more important human qualities like compassion, like artistic sensitivity, like spirituality. If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering and AI and brain-computer interfaces, he is likely to want to create a race of super soldiers who are much more intelligent and much stronger and also much

disciplined and never rebel and march on Moscow against him, but he has no interest in making them more compassionate or more spiritual. So the end result could be a new type of humans, a downgraded humans who are highly intelligent and disciplined but have no compassion and no spiritual depth. And this is one for me, this is, you know, the dystopia, the apocalypse that when people talk about the new technologies and they have this scenario of, you know, the Terminator robot trying industry shooting people. This is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that. What really worries me is using the corporations, armies, politicians will use the new technologies to change us in a way which will destroy our humanity or the best parts of our humanity. And one of those ways could be removing the compassion. Another way that really worries me, for me, is probably more likely is a Brave New World kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans, maybe it removes the diversity in humans and makes us all kind of

dopamine-chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment in the short term, which kind of seems like a good thing, maybe in the short term, but it creates a society that doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself at a more and more rapid pace, which uh seems like another kind of society that could be easily controlled by a centralized Center of power, but the set of dystopias that we could arrive at through this um through a long corporations to modify humans is uh uh is vast, and we should be worried about that, so it's it seems like humans are pretty good as we are, all the flaws, all of it together, we are better than anything that we can intentionally design at present, yeah like any intentionally designed humans at the present moment is going to be much much worse than us because basically we don't understand ourselves, I mean as long as we don't understand our brain, our body, our mind, it's a very very bad idea to start.

manipulating a system that you don't understand deeply, and we don't understand ourselves.

Humans will all die in 100 years | Yuval Noah Harari and Lex Fridman

Clips from the Lex Fridman podcast. Visit the main channel for full conversations and other videos.