Yuval Noah Harari: ‘How Do We Share the Planet With This New Superintelligence?’

Liberals often accept these processes for dignity and refuse to consider where they came from. For example, your home contains electricity and drinking water. When you go to the bathroom and flush the water, the sewer goes into a huge sewer system. That system is created and maintained by the state. However, in a liberal mentality, you only use the toilet and flush the water and it is easy to consider that no one needs to maintain it. But of course anyone needs it.

There is no such thing as the perfect free market. In addition to competition, there is always a kind of faith system. Some things can be successfully created through competition in a free market, but there are some services and requirements that simply cannot sustain the market competition. An instance of justice.

Imagine a perfect free market. Suppose I enter a business agreement with you and I break that agreement. So we go to court and ask the judge to decide. But if I bribe the judge? Suddenly you can’t trust the free market. You will not tolerate the judge on behalf of the person who gives the most bribe. If justice was to be sold in a completely free market, justice would break themselves and people would no longer believe in each other. The Trust to respect the contract and promise will disappear and there will be no arrangements for applying them.

Therefore, any competition always requires some structure of confidence. In my book, I use the example of Soccer’s World Cup. You are competing against each other in different countries, but in order to compete, you must first have a contract with a simple set of rules. If Japan has its own rules and Germany has another rule, there will be no competition. In other words, even competition requires a foundation for common beliefs and contracts. Otherwise, the order itself will collapse.

Photograph: Shintero Joshimatasu

In NexusYou note that the media has made mass democracy possible – in other words, the development of information technology and the development of democratic organizations. If that is, what opportunities are possible for the negative potential of the people and the positive change in democracy?

For example, on social media, fake news, chaos and conspiracy theories are deliberately spread to destroy people. However, algorithms are not essentially a spreader of fake news and conspiracy theories. Many have just achieved it because they were designed to do it.

The purpose of the algorithms of Facebook, YouTube and Tikatok is to maximize the users of the user. The easiest way to do this, it was discovered after many experiments and errors, spreading information that encouraged human anger, hatred and desire. This is because when people get angry, they are turning to follow the information and spreading it to others, which increases the busyness.

But what if we gave the algorithm a different purpose? For example, if you give it a purpose, such as increasing confidence in people or increasing the truth, algorithm will never spread fake news. On the contrary, it will help the formation of a developed society, a developed democratic society.