Yuval Harari: “How do we share the planet with this new superintelligence?”

Libertarians tend to take these mechanisms as givens and don’t think about where they came from. You have drinking water and electricity in your house, for example. The sewage from your bathroom flushing is sent to a large sewage system. This system is maintained and created by the government. In the libertarian mind, it’s easy to assume that everyone just flushes the toilet and uses it. Someone has to do it. There must always be a system of trust in addition to the competition. In a free marketplace, competition can create certain things, but there are also some services and needs that cannot be sustained solely by the market. Justice is one example.

Imagine a perfect free market. Imagine I sign a contract with you and then I breach that contract. We go to court to ask the judge for a ruling. What if I bribed the Judge? You suddenly can’t believe in the free market. You wouldn’t tolerate a judge siding with the person who paid most bribes. Justice would be destroyed if justice was traded on a free market. People would lose trust in each other. The trust to honor contracts and promises would disappear, and there would be no system to enforce them.

Therefore, any competition always requires some structure of trust. In my book I use the World Cup as an example. In order to have a competition, you need teams from different nations competing against one another. But, first, there needs to be an agreement on a set of common rules. There would be no competition if Japan had its own set of rules and Germany another. Otherwise, order itself will collapse. Otherwise, order itself will collapse.

Photograph: Shintaro Yoshimatsu

In Nexus, you note that the mass media made mass democracy possible–in other words, that information technology and the development of democratic institutions are correlated. What positive changes are possible in democracies, besides the negative effects of populism or totalitarianism? However, algorithms do not always spread fake news or conspiracy theories. The algorithms on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are designed to maximize user engagement. After much trial and errors, it was found that the easiest way to achieve this was to spread information which fueled anger, hatred and desire. This is because when people are angry, they are more inclined to pursue the information and spread it to others, resulting in increased engagement.

But what if we gave the algorithm a different purpose? If you want to increase trust or truthfulness among people, then the algorithm won’t spread fake news. It will instead help to build a more democratic and better society.