The Greatest Threat Humans Just Can’t Stomach with Yuval Noah Harari
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Why does Yuval Harari say our gut refuses to accept an “alien intelligence” like AI?
Welcome back to Thinking the Unthinkable with me, Rory Stewart. Every week on this podcast, we talk about things that absolutely fascinate me, but they're often the stories of the week. An election in Germany, an earthquake, a flood in Nepal. Something that's happening in the British Parliament, new prime minister. But there are other things that we don't talk about as much, which may be far, far more important and are much less visible. The things that could actually completely upend our societies, things that could destroy us. And in this series, I'm going to try to go into the heart of some of those things. Some of them are things we used to talk about, but we don't talk about very much anymore. Nuclear war.
Some of them are things that we talk about, but we barely understand yet, AI. And some of it are things that we hear about, terrorism, ISIS, totalitarianism, but which we don't really understand the texture of, where I'm going to be sitting down with people who've actually lived on the ground in Mosul under ISIS, in Membij, northeast Syria, as ISIS is coming up, talking about human nature and about totalitarianism, about extremism. And in all of this, I hope we're getting to the real core of what really in the end matters about politics, the really biggest things, the things that our minds struggle to predict, that our political systems, our newspapers struggle to really talk about, that voters aren't incentivized to raise, things which are unthinkable.
And the question we'll be raising is, how do you think about the unthinkable?
This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it.
There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. My guest today is Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most famous public intellectuals alive today, the author of Sapiens. Today, we're going to be asking perhaps the most fundamental question in existential risk. What happens if with AI, we are building an alien intelligence that turns out to basically create a new form of empire, an empire in which AI is the emperor and we are the vassals? What's that going to mean for our economy? What's that going to mean for our politics? Ultimately, what's it going to mean for our minds and our sense of ourselves? And how can we learn from past civilizations on what happens when this incredible rupture occurs?
Yuval Noah Harari. Can we sort of start with the general idea of this thinking the unthinkable? I don't know whether we want to call them existential risks, but what this category of things are and whether you recognize it as a category.
You know, the purpose of politics, I think, is all about is making choices, is defining challenges and problems that face society. giving the public two, three, five options, and then we have a conversation about it, and we need to choose what is the right policy. This is when politics functions well. But for this to happen, the politicians need to focus on the most important problems that face society. And every now and then, something happens in history which is just outside the normal political discourse, that we don't think about it. We don't even have words to describe what it is, but it could be the most important next thing. And then the job of politicians is to think the unthinkable. You know, the range of examples from human history is quite wide.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why does Yuval Harari say our gut refuses to accept an “alien intelligence” like AI?
0:08–8:37
2
What can the Aztec Empire’s failure against Cortés teach us about today’s AI threat?
8:37–15:55
3
How does the brain‑stomach barrier affect our perception of pandemic and AI risks?
15:55–23:20
4
What are the three policy options Britain faces to avoid becoming an AI vassal state?
23:20–30:22
5
Why might open‑source AI and European cooperation be a viable alternative to US‑China dominance?
30:22–37:02
6
How could AI‑driven financial systems become invisible and uncontrollable for ordinary people?
37:02–42:45
Speakers
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