Yuval Noah Harari Speaks to Young Readers & Teachers About 'Unstoppable Us' | Aprendemos Juntos

Yuval Noah Harari Speaks to Young Readers & Teachers About 'Unstoppable Us' | Aprendemos Juntos - 이중 자막

So, hello everybody.

I'm Yuval.

It's good to be here.

I'm a historian, which means that I'm interested in how we got here and how things that happened long ago still shape our life today.

And I think that trying to understand how we got here is something that always interested me since I was a little kid.

One of my first memories is that when I was six years old,

and I lived in Israel,

I still live in Israel, and on television, it was 1982, and I was fascinated and horrified watching on television the image.

the videos from the Falklands-Malvinas War,

and there was one thing in particular that stuck in my mind really and until today that the Argentinians sunk a British ship, the Sheffield.

And I saw on television that the images of this big metal-ship sinking,

and then they had an interview with a British soldier,

I don't remember what he talked about, but they also said that he died during the sinking of the ship.

And I didn't understand how I can see him talking if he's dead.

I was 60 years old at the time.

And I had two questions that really bothered me,

and that I think still bothered me today, and that kind of directed me towards being a historian.

One question.

Why is there so much suffering in the world and why are people so mean and cruel to each other,

starting all these wars and killing each other?

And the other question was what happens to people after they die?

What happened to that soldier?

after he died and it was ground so okay I'm now sitting here watching him on television

talking but he's dead so where is he really and these two questions led me to to the study of

history of how we got here Because, you know, some people think that wars are just a natural part of the world.

But this is what people do.

But it was strange because most of the people that I knew were nice people.

You know,

they love their parents,

they love their children,

they love to play,

so how can

we Nice people they end up starting wars and and and killing each

other Where is this coming from and with regard to the other question of what happens to people after they die

So I obviously I asked my parents,

and my older sisters, and my teachers, and they told me all kinds of stories, but I got the impression they don't really know.

They just invented these stories, or somebody invented these stories, and they don't really know.

And years this bothered me that how is it that adults can go about their lives,

and you know,

worrying about their bank account or about this or my grades in school when they don't even know what happens to us after we die and also where did all these strange stories come from

and As a story and I still study today these two questions Why are there so many wars in the world,

and more generally, why is there so much suffering in the world?

Where is it all coming from?

And also where are all these strange stories that people tell each other?

Where do they come from?

Are they true?

Or is it just that somebody invented it at a certain point in time,

maybe thousands of years ago, and told it to some people, who told it to other people, who eventually told it to me?

And one last thing maybe say is that history is not just about the past,

it is also about Because really,

when we study history, we try to understand people, why people behave the way they do and can they behave in a different way.

And one of my hopes is that by understanding how people behave, we can learn to do better.

So if you have any questions about these issues or anything else that comes to mind, the floor is yours.

Yeah, so my latest book is for kids, that in a way I kind of wrote a lot

trying to answer some of the big questions that bother me as a child.

And I'm also very happy that Vikoud is here, that he helped me with the images of the book.

I that behind me there shouldn't be images, yes.

So these are the images from the book, which I can't draw like this.

This is why I cooperate with Vikoud, who is this wonderful artist who can produce such images.

And the title of the book is Unstoppable Us, and...

Unstoppable means two different things.

On the one hand, it means that we humans are the most powerful animals in the world, and nobody else can stop us.

Not the lions, not the elephants, not the whales, they cannot stop us.

We are much, much more powerful than they are.

If decide to destroy the forest in which they live,

or to pollute the ocean in which they live, they can't really do much about it.

There is really no force which can stop us, the other meaning of this word, unstoppable, is that also we cannot stop ourselves.

That very often, no matter what we achieve, what we get, it never satisfies.

We always want more, we don't know how to stop.

Somebody who has a million dollars, want two million dollars, somebody who has two million dollars, want 10 million dollars.

It's always like that.

A king who controls one kingdom, wants to conquer another kingdom.

Because of that,

that this is why we are often causing so much havoc,

so much chaos in the world,

because we just don't know how to stop ourselves,

how to just be satisfied with what we already have,

and it also means that even though we are the most powerful animal on the planet,

we are not necessarily the happiest animal on the planet,

that, again, to be happy you don't need power necessarily, you just need to be satisfied with what you

And this is something which is extremely difficult for human beings to do.

This is why for thousands of years, ever the Stone Age, we were very, very good in acquiring more power, in getting more power.

But we were never very good in translating power.

into happiness,

which again,

you see it even on the level of individual people,

if you think about the most powerful people today on the planet,

the most powerful political leaders,

the presidents and the prime ministers about the most powerful,

the billions, They are not necessarily happy people, and again it goes all the way to our entire species.

And we keep inventing new stuff,

creating new tools,

exploring new places,

even new Hoping that the next thing we create,

the next place we conquer, this finally make us satisfied, make us happy, and it just never happens.

And I think the biggest question for humans now in the 21st century,

we have so much power that we can destroy not just the other animals, we also are in danger of destroying ourselves.

And if we don't find a way how to translate power into happiness,

how to be satisfied with what we have,

Instead of running after more and more, there is a very big danger that we will destroy ourselves.

One of the very interesting things that we discovered in recent years is that for most

of the time that there were human beings in the beings There were a lot of different kinds of humans.

Today in the world, anywhere you go on the planet, you find exactly the same humans, like you and me.

You go to Spain, you to Israel, you to Africa, you go to America, you to Australia, it's exactly the same humans.

But it is actually very strange, because if you go to different places around the world today, you don't find the same kinds of birds.

Like, you go to North America, you have grizzly bears.

In Spain, I know if you have bears, but they're not grizzlies.

They're brown bears or black bears.

In China, they have panda bears.

You polar bears.

You have different kinds of bears in different places.

Similarly, you have different kinds of snakes, and you have different kinds of birds and fish.

So, how come everywhere you have just one kind of humans?

And the thing is that if you go back in time,

Now, many, many years, tens of thousands of years, you reach a period in era when

there were many different kinds of humans living on this planet at the same time, like with the other animals.

Historians and archaeologists who dig in the ground to find evidence for ancient

They now have a lot of evidence about these other kinds of humans,

so one kind of human that maybe you've heard about on Neanderthals, until about 40,000-45,000 years ago.

Spain was not inhabited by humans like us, but by a different kind of human called the Neanderthals.

And there was an island in what is today Indonesia,

the island of Flores,

which was inhabited by an altogether other kind of humans,

which were very small humans,

But not like in fairy tales,

they're real,

very small humans,

they reached a height of about 1 meter,

they weighed something like 25 kilograms,

but they were also human beings,

they knew how to produce tools,

they knew how to light a fire, they hunted, they hunted elephants, but the elephants were also very small elephants.

Because on that island, you had very small humans and very small elephants.

How did it happen?

It wasn't kind of magic.

It's not that there was some sorcerer or some wizard who waved the magic wand

and turned all the humans and elephants into very small versions of themselves.

It happened by the process we call evolution that what happened is that at one time this island was connected to the continent of Asia.

So humans, big humans and big elephants who lived in Asia, they just went there the same way they went everywhere else.

And then the seas rose, the level of the oceans.

It and this bit of land, it was disconnected from the mainland, and it became an island.

And some humans and elephants got stuck there on the island of Rome.

And there wasn't a lot to eat.

So the smallest humans and the smallest elephants who needed the least amount of food, they survived best.

We often think that the big people, they have the biggest advantage.

But it's not true, there are some situations in life that being the smallest is the best.

And this was one such situation, because the big humans and the big elephants, they died first, the smaller one survived better.

And then when the smallest man and the smallest woman had children together,

they're particularly And again,

the same thing happened in the next generation,

out of, say, five children, the bigger ones, they needed more food, there wasn't a lot of food, so they died.

And the smallest ones, they survived.

So after generation, the smallest people survived and had even smaller people.

Now it wasn't like very big differences, but every generation say a few and an inch less or a few millimeters less.

After a couple of thousand years, the big humans became dwarves and the big elephants became dwarf elephants.

And this is the process of evolution, and this actually happens to us.

all the animals in the world, and the plants, and also even viruses, if you remember that the corona, they also undergo evolution.

They constantly change, and this is Humans like us, not just the humans on floris, we also undergo this process of evolution.

I mean, why aren't they here with us today in the world?

And this is, again, one of the big questions that historians research, and apparently we drove them to extinction.

That when our kind of humans,

which is called homo sapiens,

we are all sapiens,

we lived in Africa at the time that the little people lived on Flores,

and when we came out of Africa and spread all over the world,

so some of us reached the island of Flores and A few thousand years, there were no more little people living on florists.

What happened there?

Nobody for sure.

One option is that our ancestors killed them.

The other option is that our ancestors competed with them.

For the little food that was on the island,

our kind of humans,

they came there,

they hunted, all the little elephants, they picked all the fruit, nothing was left for the little people to eat, and they disappeared.

But they are not there anymore, unfortunately.

So, what was the special power that our kind of humans, Homo sapiens had, which them

again come out of Africa and conquer the whole world and reach even the little island of Flores and make all the other humans disappear.

So if you look at us as individuals we are not particularly strong or powerful animals.

Elephants are much bigger and stronger than us.

Cheetahs can run much faster than us.

Snakes have poison, eagles can fly, dolphins swim.

What can we do?

If you have a boxing match between a human being and a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee easily wins.

We are not particularly strong animals as individuals.

Also, we are not necessarily smarter than other animals.

Yes, there are many things that we know that other animals don't, but also the reverse.

There are many things that the chimpanzee knows that are...

What really makes us the most powerful animal in the world is that we can cooperate in very,

very large numbers and change the way that we cooperate all the time.

And all the big things we achieved during the whole of history, it's because of this amazing ability to cooperate.

Like if you think about humans flying to the moon,

so it wasn't the work of a single individual or even just a couple of individuals to build a spaceship and fly to the moon,

you need millions of people to cooperate.

Similarly, to build a huge pyramid, or a temple, or a city.

You need millions of people to cooperate.

Every day of our lives, we cooperate with millions.

Maybe we don't meet millions of people every day, but we still cooperate with them.

For example, very few of us grow everything that we eat.

Most of us don't grow anything.

I don't grow anything.

Maybe I grow some little plant to do my tea, herbal tea, but that's it.

Like everything I eat during the day, I eat spread, I eat fruits, I eat rice, whatever.

Other grow it for me.

So if I look at what I eat, it sometimes comes from the other side of the world.

There strangers on the other side of the world living thousands of kilometers for me, and they grow my food.

And similarly what I wear, I don't know how to make these clothes.

There are people, again, living thousands of kilometers for me who made these clothes, and I just go to the show.

shop and buy the clothes and buy the food.

And how do I do that?

I have my money, which I get by working in university and teaching students or by writing books and selling books.

So again, I don't know the people who buy my books.

I know a few of them maybe, but most of the people who buy my books, I don't know them.

And still, they buy my books and I can use this money to buy food.

So this is cooperation on a level which is really unimaginable for any other animal.

Elephants may be much, much bigger.

or a chimpanzee might be much,

much stronger than me,

but chimpanzees can't cooperate with millions of other chimpanzees

living in other parts of the world in order to grow food or in order to build a spaceship and go to the moon.

So this is our superpower, a very unique ability to cooperate in very large numbers.

And then the question is, how can we do that?

I chimpanzees, they sometimes cooperate, but only with other chimps that they know personally.

And it's difficult to know a lot of chimps, just as it's difficult to know a of people.

So chimps can cooperate only in very,

very small numbers, like 50 chimpanzees can cooperate, but 5,000 chimpanzees never, and 50 million chimpanzees are absolutely impossible.

Humans do that.

There are many countries that have, like in Spain, you have tens of millions, cooperating in the same country.

So like,

I don't know, they pay taxes, so that other people in the country, that they never met in their life, would get good healthcare.

Like somebody,

you pay some of your money,

and it goes to a hospital in a different city,

so if somebody is sick, they go to the hospital, and they get medicine, they get treatment.

This is, We don't know this person, how do we cooperate with them?

And again,

if you look at the whole world,

the whole world,

today, all of humans everywhere, they cooperate on some things, like, I get people grow food, and people in other countries buy it.

So what enables us to do that?

And the answer...

is a storytelling.

People can cooperate with strangers and foreigners in a way that chimps and elephants can't because people invent stories.

And as long as everybody believes in the same story, they don't need to know each other personally in order to cooperate.

So, for instance, I don't know, something like football is based on a story.

Like, you go to a football field and you meet some other kids there that you never met in your life before.

Within five minutes, you could be playing football together because you all know the same story about football.

If I think that football,

the aim is to stand with your feet on the ball and the person who stays longer on the ball without falling,

he wins the game or she wins the game.

This is football, I won't be able to play.

Everybody needs to know and agree on the same story.

And even if you think about, again, the food that we buy from strangers, how does it happen?

Because we all accept the story of money, and it may sound strange to call money a story, but what is it?

If you think about what money is,

We use it all the time,

we won't more of it, most of us want more of it all the time, but what is it exactly?

So in the past,

money was these pieces of paper, like and dollars, but if you look at it, it's very strange that people like it so much.

because you can't eat it, and you can't drink it, and you can't wear it, you can't do anything with it.

You know, if you give a pig a suitcase full of a million euros or an apple, the pig will always choose the apple.

No will choose the million dollars.

What can I do with the million dollars?

The I can eat, I understand.

but humans will almost always choose the million dollars because they know i can

have a dollars i can use one dollar to buy the apple and then the

other nineteen nine nine hundred ninety nine thousand dollars they all by other

stuff

but why do we value it

and today actually most money is not even paper 90-something percent of the money in the world is not paper.

It's just electronic information moving between computers.

Few and fewer people actually use paper currency to buy stuff.

It's just information moving between computers.

So I work for the whole month so that it's the end of the month.

Somebody will transfer some information from one computer to the other computer.

That's it.

How does it work?

It works because there is a story about money.

The biggest storytellers in the world are the people who tell the stories about money.

Because it's the only story that everybody believes.

Not everybody believes in God.

God, not everybody believes in Santa Claus or whatever, everybody, almost everybody believes in money.

And it's just a story.

And if everybody believes the story, it actually works.

I can take this piece of paper and give it to some stranger I never make in my life.

And she will give me an apple that I can eat.

And now they tell the same stories, or you don't need the pieces of paper.

It's just electronic information in computer.

That's enough.

If, like, this bit of information in the computer, this is worth an apple.

And as long as everybody believes that it works, sometimes it happens that people stop believing it, and then there is a huge, huge problem.

But most of the time, all of us just believe the story and as long as we do it, it works.

And is what makes us much more powerful than the elephants or the lions or the chimpanzees or anybody else.

We can cooperate with millions, with billions of other people.

to build cities and to build spaceships and to build roads and to grow food and whatever else

because we believe in all these kinds of stories.

So the first selfies in history that we know about, they are from about 40,000, 45,000 years ago from Indonesia.

We also have selfies from the Stone Age, from Spain and from France and from other places, in caves.

They all come from caves.

We have,

again, the earliest are from Indonesia, and we have there on some caves negative images of human hands that somebody put their hand on the wall of a cave in tens of thousands of years ago.

They took paint,

they created paint,

by mixing some colorful rocks with water and with some other chemicals,

and they created paint, and then they took, as far as we can reconstruct it, they took a tube of wood, like a hollow wood.

wood, and they put their paint in the tube, and they put their hands and took the tube

and also flew,

and the paint sprayed all over the hand,

and then they removed the hand,

and on the wall of the cave you had the stencil,

the kind of reverse image of the And you can today go to Indonesia and see these,

it's a kind of selfie,

it's somebody taking an image of themselves from something like 45,000 years ago, which is really amazing to think about.

Nobody knows for sure why they did it, whether it is...

A mark, a personal mark of themselves for future generations.

Maybe it was some way to communicate with, I don't know, spirits or gods or something like that.

There are also places where you find a kind of group selfie.

that a of people came together and everybody put their hand on the wall of the cave and sprayed the paint,

and we have this group selfie.

There is a very famous cave in Argentina,

which is called the Cave of the Hands, because you have a huge wall there just covered with these rock selfies.

thousands of years ago, which, again, we don't know exactly how to interpret, but if you want, you can still do it today.

I mean, the selfies that you take on your smartphone, who knows how long they will remain.

But you go to some cave and take this paint and spray it on your hand,

maybe somebody 40,000 years from now will discover it and know something about you.

What we do know by analyzing these ancient handprints is that many of them, maybe even most of them, were done by teenagers and children.

So maybe it was a kind of thing that young people,

the grown-ups thought that this is ridiculous, and why do you waste your time or your paint on this?

But now we have them, 40,000 years later.

And I would like to you to all of you for your would like to for your My basic aim in that book,

which is also my basic aim with the unstoppable arse.

I sapiens was for grownups, for and unstoppable arse tries to do the same thing for kids aged, say, eight or ten or twelve.

It's really to tell in one book in an accessible way,

in way that it's easy to understand and even fun, to tell the entire history of us, of our species.

From the time that we were really just animals, apes, living in the African savannah, not much different from zebras or chimpanzees or giraffes.

Until today,

until the 21st century,

when we are really almost That we have divine powers of creation and destruction we can fly in the air

We can blow up entire Cities we can create new types of life With genetic engineering without official intelligence.

So the big question is how did this ape from the African?

How did it turn into a kind of God that now controls the whole world and controls even the future of all the other animals?

Maybe we don't see ourselves as gods.

But if you think about us,

from the viewpoint of a chimpanzee or of an elephant or of a rat, we do look like gods in what we can do.

So that's the main aim.

And think it's a success partly because people want to know our story.

And because I always try to connect.

the distant events of the past to people's life today.

A lot of people, they find history sometimes boring or irrelevant.

They oh, history this list of all these dead kings who lived thousands of years ago and fought wars and battles.

What do I care about them?

How are these kings related to my life?

But I think the point about history is to understand how events in a very distant past

still shape how we live and how we feel So,

for instance,

when I was a kid,

I used to wake up in the middle of the night,

sometimes afraid that there is a monster under the bed, or there is a monster in the room, sometimes still happens to be even today.

And why does it happen?

And it's not something wrong,

if it happens to you too, it's not something wrong about you, it's actually a from the very distant past, it actually comes from history.

Because hundreds of thousands of years ago,

when we were animals,

apes living in the savannah,

there were actually monsters that came to eat kids

in the middle of the

You were sleeping under some tree somewhere in the savannah and a cheetah or a lion would come to eat you.

And if you woke up,

you had some noise and you woke up and you called your mom or you climbed the tree or something, you survived.

If you didn't, if you kept sleeping, the lion ate you.

So the people who survived are the people who were afraid of monsters in the dark.

And this was such a deep fear that,

you know,

our bodies,

we now live in a big city like Madrid, with computers and air conditions and airplanes and supermarkets, but our body doesn't know it.

Our body still thinks that we are in the African savannah,

and that there are monsters that might come to eat us in the middle of the night.

So when it hears some strange noise, it wakes up.

Maybe a lion is coming.

And things about our life, again, we need to understand the past.

And if you go along the African path, all those years ago, and you find a fig tree with lots of sweet figs.

The best thing you can do for yourself,

your body, is to eat as many of them as quickly as possible, because this is very rare to find all these sweet fruits.

and say, okay, that's enough for me, I go back, I come tomorrow, I eat some more figs.

When come back tomorrow,

there are no figs because the baboons who live next door, they came in the night and they ate all the figs.

So the good thing to do,

if you want to take care of your body,

eat as many of them as you And our body learned,

you come across something very sweet, eat as much of it as quickly as possible.

Or you now live,

again in the middle of my grid, in the 21st century, and you open the refrigerator and you find a sweet cake.

Look, your body doesn't know that this is Madrid in the 21st century.

Your body still thinks, I'm in the African savannah, I found some sweet fruit.

If I don't eat all of it right now, the will eat it.

So I better eat all of it right now.

And it's not that there is something wrong with it.

This is how it lived, the body, for so many years, and it's such a short time.

Since we left the African savannah and moved to live in these big cities with refrigerators and supermarkets and sweet cakes.

And we understand history, it this way helps us understand so many things about how we actually live and feel right now.

I would like to thank you all I would like thank panelists for having a great opportunity to do this.

I would like to thank you panelists for being here today.

The invention, the creation of AI, is maybe the most important invention of humans.

Certainly, the 21st century, maybe ever.

AI can do many good things for us.

It can help us discover new medicines,

it help us find ways to deal with the ecological crisis, how to save electricity, so things, but it can also destroy us.

And we need to understand that AI is different from every previous invention in human history.

Because you hear some of us people say,

well, yes, AI is a new thing,

but every time there is a new invention,

people are worried when people invented the car,

when people invented the printing press, when people invented writing, they'll always worry, oh, how would we manage?

But AI is different in two very important respects.

First of all, It's the first invention, the first tool, the first technology in human history that can make decisions by itself.

Every previous itself.

Every previous tool we need to It made us more powerful because the decision how to use the tool was always made only by humans.

When people invented a knife, a stone knife tens of thousands of years ago, the stone knife cannot decide what to do with it.

You can use a stone knife to murder somebody.

You can use it to save their life in surgery.

You use it to cut salad.

The knife doesn't tell you what to do.

Similarly, when people invented even nuclear technology, you can use nuclear technology to destroy humankind, to cities and countries.

You can use nuclear technology to produce cheap and plentiful electricity.

It humanity.

Nuclear reactors by themselves, they don't tell you what to do with them, you decide.

AI is different.

AI can make decisions by itself.

It's already making decisions.

Not about itself, also about us.

Increasingly, it's not a human being deciding what will happen with you, it's an AI.

Similarly again, if you watch YouTube, then it's not a human being that decides which video to show you next.

It's an algorithm, it's an AI making these decisions, and we have never encountered something like this before.

and it takes power away from us.

The other thing that AI is different from every previous technology, it can create new ideas by itself.

The press could not create Somebody wrote a book.

I know, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, you take it to the printing press, the printing press prints it.

It cannot write Don Quixote by itself.

It cannot write a commentary about Don Quixote.

No, it just does blindly whatever you tell it.

Similarly, So, okay, we invent radio.

The radio cannot decide what to play.

Whether a rock and roll or a classical symphony, whether a speech by some general or whatever, we have to decide what the radio plays.

AI can create.

texts, and music, and paintings, and images, and videos by itself.

So maybe in just a very few years,

we will live in a world in which most decisions are not taken by humans,

in which Stories are not told by humans, in which most images are not painted by humans.

We no idea what this means.

We are used to living in a world in which humans make the decisions, and all our culture is human culture.

And this is something completely interesting.

which we do not understand.

Now, it's not necessarily bad.

It can also, of course, make good decisions.

It can also make good stories of good creations.

But basic thing to understand is that it's the first time in history that really power is being taken away from us,

shifting to something alien, not an alien from outer space for another planet.

But it's still alien, thinks, it makes decisions, it creates things in a fundamentally different way than human beings.

And we might be very close to a point when we can no longer understand the world in which we live.

because it will be increasingly run by an alien intelligence we don't understand and full of things that we didn't create.

How many people in the world really understand finance?

Maybe% of people, if you're very generous.

Maybe in 20 years, the number of people who understand the financial system, the number of people who money, is exactly zero.

That AI took over, not only making more and more of the decisions, that is a cultural creation.

We printed these paper notes.

We decided what is electronic money.

You know all these new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they are cultural creations.

What happens if AI invents new kinds of money that we don't understand?

So we will be like the chimpanzees and the elephants.

Dealing with something we can't understand, which is much, much more powerful than us.

And this is not, you know, thousands of years in the future.

This can happen within 10, 20 years.

So there are also good scenarios, but we need to make wise decisions right now.

about AI when we still have the power to make the decisions, because if we wait, it will make the decisions for us.

come in the fence of the rasosidad.

But do you think that the rasosidad is the biggest?

Yeah.

When I said it's the weakest link,

I meant it from the viewpoint of the people who tell the big stories that run society,

like the stories about money, or the stories about God, or the stories about politics.

that, you know, with the adults, with people who are like 40, 50, 16,

they heard the stories so many times that they hardly even think about them anymore.

I adults use money all the time.

What is the last time that you think about what actually is this money?

But children, in this sense, are the weakest link in society because it's all new to them.

They haven't heard the story about money or the story about God many times and they still ask questions What is this thing?

Why should I believe it?

Why should it be like this and not like that?

And that makes it,

from the viewpoint,

again, of the people who tell these big important stories, they are, if something changes, it will probably come from the children,

from the younger generation, because they are still not very convinced of our story.

So, you know, like big stories, for instance, that, I don't know,

that rich people who have lots of money,

they live in big palaces and fly around in whatever,

and then the poor people, they have to come and wash their dishes and clean their floors.

Why?

So, I don't hardly ask these questions.

They say,

oh, this is just the way things are, because they heard the story that this is how the world should function many, many times.

But the children, they ask difficult questions.

Or, to give another very important example from history, so many, many years there

was a very important story that some people told that girls and boys are different,

very different from each other, that boys are much better than girls, and this is why only boys were allowed.

Or only boys could be priests, or only boys could grow up to be politicians, or professors, or journalists.

And this was just a story that somebody invented.

It wasn't true, of course.

But people repeated this story so many times.

that everybody was convinced that this is just the way things are.

And until very recently, for instance, even in Spain, women could not go to university, and women could not vote in elections.

And even today they can't be priests in the church.

And the adults accepted this as, you know, this is how things are.

God said that they can't, so they can't.

But it comes, especially from the young people, that they say why is it so, and is it really true?

And over the last century, in many countries around the world, including in Spain, so people realize, no, it's not a truth.

It's just a story that somebody invented.

Hundreds of years ago,

thousands of years ago,

and we shouldn't believe this story anymore that boys are better than girls,

that girls can also go to school and go to university and be politicians and be professors and so forth.

Our society is often built on stories which were invented by people.

Some of these stories are very good, they us cooperate, but some of these stories can be extremely harmful.

And then it's very good that people ask questions, is it really so?

And when they realize it's just a story somebody invented,

then they can use our superpower of inventing stories and telling stories and just change the story.

And this is what happens again and again through history.

And very often,

again, the children of the weakest link in society, in the sense that they are the ones who don't know the big stories yet,

so they are the ones who raise the questions and may lead to changes.

You don't have to, but I think it's helpful in life.

One of the things we learn in history is where all the stories come from.

And this helps us understand what is the truth about the world.

And what is just a story that somebody invented,

some human being invented it a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago This is a very central part of history

It's not about the past, it's almost never, history is not really about the past.

The past is gone,

you can't go back there, you cannot go back to live in the Stone Age, you go back to live in the Middle Ages.

So why do we study these things, the Stone Age of Ferdinand and Isabella?

Because relevant to our life today.

And from our feelings and emotions to what we can do in life,

To understanding these very complicated things, like I talked about money, so let's give another example, like corporations.

You meet corporations every day of your life.

What are they?

And to understand this, you need to understand history.

Because they are not animals.

We didn't come from biology.

They didn't grow like trees or came from the sea, like they are things we created.

They are actually, again, they are stories.

But I think to live in the 21st century,

not just as an adult,

but also as an age You need to understand it because you need to be to be careful about it again in the past

So kids were told how to be careful about lions and elephants.

What happens if a big?

Angry elephant comes your way.

What you do was important to know today?

It's unlikely that it will happen without knowing history If there is something wrong about them,

it will be very difficult to change their story and to protect ourselves.

Well, that's the biggest challenge facing humanity.

We three big challenges now in the world.

One is the ecological challenge.

With all the power that we have, we are increasingly destroying the world.

We are killing the other animals.

We cutting down the forests.

We are polluting the forests.

And we are destroying the ground on which we also live, and we don't know how to stop ourselves.

People who do that, they are not necessarily bad people.

They just don't know how to stop themselves.

And this is one very big challenge.

The other big challenge is what, again, we talked about earlier, with artificial intelligence and all the new technologies that we are creating.

We are creating something that can be even more powerful than us,

and yes, it will stop us, but maybe in ways that we wouldn't like.

So we have to be very careful about that, that's the second big challenge.

And then the third challenge is going back all the way to the beginning of this meeting.

I talked about wars and about the tendency of humans, even good humans, to do terrible things to one another.

And now we have so much power.

power, that if there is another big war in the world, like the First World War or the

Second World War, so it will probably be the last war, because we will not survive it.

And you would think that humans are so smart,

how they won't destroy themselves,

but, and the paradox about humans is that we are such a smart animal that keeps doing so many stupid things.

And we don't know how to stop it.

We don't know how to stop ourselves.

So that's the third challenge.

And I think the key to all these challenges is really the ability to work together.

If we manage to avoid it, fighting each other, and instead we cooperate, then we can solve the other problems.

We have enough power, we have enough wisdom to know how to deal with the ecological challenge.

to prevent climate change, to save the other animals, to the pollution, we can do it.

And even in this sense, we are unstoppable.

If we really decided all of us together, we're going to do it, nothing could stop us, we could do it.

And similarly,

when it comes to something like AI,

like artificial intelligence,

if everybody could agree,

to work together to be careful about this thing,

to have lows and rules about how to prevent it from taking over from us, we can do that too.

But we are not doing it.

Instead, we are fighting more and more, again,

And I think this is the biggest challenge that we face that, in this sense, we are our biggest problem.

How to stop ourselves, how to control ourselves.

And I think...

That the problem comes to a large extent, again from a superpower, from this ability to tell stories.

That it's a good ability, we do many good things with the stories we tell.

Like mentioned football, so it's a story and it's very nice to play football together.

But very bad thing that we do is the story.

We tell ourselves stories that we are different from everybody else.

Like every group of people in the world has a story which says we are not just different from everybody else,

we are better than all of them.

We are better, we are superior.

And we are more important like everybody thinks they are the center of the world the entire world revolves around

them And this is why they cannot cooperate and This is really it's not true.

It's just you know We keep inventing these stories that we are better than everybody,

that we are more important than everybody, but this is just a story in our mind.

They all have this story, and they are all wrong.

None of them is better than everybody else.

None them is the most important.

And the way to realize it is every now and then to leave all the stories in the mind and go back to the body.

Because when you really look at our bodies, then you understand we are actually all the same.

We don't have different bodies.

We like to eat sweet things.

We all need to go to sleep at night.

We all wake up in the middle of the night sometimes afraid.

Oh, not just people.

Also, a little skunk, when a fox come, the skunk would call his mother or her mother.

Because this is true of all mammals and birds, at least when they are young, they depend on their parents.

So the connection between children and parents is not an invention of any human culture.

It comes way, way, way before there are any humans around in the world.

And if we remember these things, that yes, we have different languages and religions, but this is all very recent.

All the nations in the world, Spanish and French and Russians and Ukrainians and Chinese, they are all from the last 5,000 years.

If you go back 5,000 years, you don't fight any Christian, any Jew, any Muslim, any any any Chinese.

It's all from the last 5,000 years, which nothing 5,000 years.

Sounds a long time, 5,000 years.

But there are humans on the planet for millions of years.

And there are animals on the planet for hundreds of millions of years.

And if we really connect to the deepest level inside ourselves,

then we find that there are a lot more things that are common for everybody, even the animals.

that things that separate us,

and if we remember this enough, then hopefully all the stories in our mind will not set us up against each other.

And then we can deal with the AI, then we can deal with the ecological problem.

We have the power to do that.

Thank you very So it's a very difficult and very important question,

because really this is the first time in history that we don't really know how to answer it.

Because we just don't know how the world works.

in 20 or 30 years.

Of course, people could never predict the future.

They could never predict if there would be some earthquake or epidemic or war.

But other things, people could predict because they didn't change very quickly.

You knew for most of history what skills people will need in order to survive, in order to work.

Like if you live in the Middle Ages, I don't know, in times of Ferdinand and Isabella.

So again, you don't know what would be the political situation.

in 20 or 30 years.

But you do know that most people would still be farmers.

So you are a farmer,

you teach your kids how to sow wheat and how to harvest the wheat and gather the grains and grind them and make bread.

And you teach them how to build a house.

And you teach them how to ride a horse.

Or how to ride a horse and carriage.

Because you need these things.

You need it in 20 years.

Now, when we look 20 years to the future, it's not just that we don't know what will be the police.

We also have no idea what the economy will be like, what the job market would be like, what kind of jobs people will have.

We know that many jobs that people do today will disappear.

Other jobs will appear, but we don't know which jobs So, if we focus on a particular skill, it's very dangerous.

Like few years ago, people would say, you know, the most important thing to teach kids is how to code.

Because computers are the most important thing in the 21st century,

we will always need a of coders, it's a good profession, teach kids how to code.

Now the new generation of AI knows how to code, and it improves in such a remarkable way very, very quickly.

So maybe in 20 years you don't need coders at all, you don't need human coders.

Maybe you need completely different things.

We don't know what.

So if we teach...

a narrow set of scales, it's a very bad idea.

We need to teach them how to keep learning.

and how to keep changing throughout their lives because this is the only certain thing about the future

is that there will be more and more changes bigger and more rapid.

Now for most of history, life was divided roughly into two stages.

In the first part of life, you mostly learned.

You learned things about the world, you learned your acquired basic skills, Then, in the second part of life, you mostly worked.

Of course,

you always learn new stuff,

but your basic understanding of the world, your skills, like how to be a farmer, you got this as a young person.

And, as an adult, as an older person, you just make use of what you learned in your use.

This is now over.

What you learn as a young person, by the time you're 30 or 50, it's The world is completely different.

You need to relearn everything.

Actually, it's becoming important to forget.

To adapt to the new world, you actually need a skill to forget what you think you know.

Because what you think you know often interrupts, often makes it more difficult to learn new things.

Maybe you even need to learn again how to walk and how to sing.

Like in the past as a baby,

You learn how to walk,

you learn how to see, and until you die, this is how you walk and see, I mean, what can change?

Now, with the creation of new virtual worlds, that people may spend more and more time in virtual reality,

and the laws of the In virtual reality, it could be different.

You walk differently there.

You see differently.

So maybe you need at age 20 or 50 or 60 to learn again how to walk in a new kind of world.

And we can't predict that.

So what we should focus on is teaching young people how to keep learning and keep changing throughout their lives,

and really how to keep a flexible mind.

Maybe this is the most important skill, how to remain flexible.

how to keep kind of reinventing yourself, again and again throughout life.

And for that,

a very important part of it is to be able to let go of what you think you know,

to be able to say, I don't know.

which is not easy because, you know, in school, also in university, when somebody says I don't know, very often they get a bad mark.

But the ability to say I don't know, The honesty takes courage.

It's the first step towards knowledge is to admit that I don't know.

If you pretend that you know, you will never learn anything new.

And this is actually also very important now, but it's always been important.

Science, is on ignorance.

Science is the image.

that created modern science was not a discovery of any piece of knowledge in geography or Copernicus or Darvino,

the big scientific revolution which launched modern science was a discovery of ignorance.

For thousands of years, people thought they know everything.

That some holy book or some holy person or whatever, they know everything.

We don't need to learn anything new.

We everything.

And science began with, when some humans admitted, There is no book in the world which has all the answers.

There is no person in the world that knows everything.

And that we have the courage and honesty to admit our ignorance, now we can start investigating.

And that's science.

Thank very I think the most important thing to realize is that we made the world what it is.

And therefore we can also change it.

The world that we know, of course we didn't decide the of physics.

We didn't decide the laws of biology.

We didn't create the stars and the galaxies known.

We do that.

But the world we inhabit everywhere,

The political structures,

like that we live in countries,

in states, the economic structures, like that we have money, that we have corporations, are the cultural ideas, religions, the laws of different countries.

This is something we created.

Nobody decided for us that we will live in countries,

and these will be the borders of these countries, and that we will use money, and this will be the type of money we use.

No, this is something that humans decided for themselves.

We created these things,

and therefore, if there is a problem in any of these things, We also have the power and the responsibility to change them.

And how did we create all these things with stories?

Whether it's religion, whether it's politics, whether it's money, we created them by telling stories, which is not bad.

Again, sorry.

But if some story creates a lot of problem, we can change the story, we invented it, we created it.

So that's very important to know that we have this power, and it's also very important to use this power.

Have we now and then?

If we go about changing all the stories all the time, society will just collapse.

And then like playing football,

that if everybody has a different story in their mind about how to play football, and they change it every day, nobody can play football.

I actually football is a good model for how the world as a whole can function.

Because we need countries,

we need our tribes, we need our groups, but we also need them to agree on some things and to cooperate with each other.

Everybody because they all agree on the same basic story,

on the same basic rules,

If the Spanish had one set of rules for football and the French had a different set of rules, they couldn't play each other.

So I think this should be a model for the world on a larger scale.

that yes, we still belong to different families, to different countries, to religions, and that's fine.

And you pay your taxes to the Spanish government or to the Argentinian government or to the Mexican government,

so that people in your country will get better healthcare and better education.

But, at the same time, we also find rules and stories which are common to all the humans

and enable us to deal with common problems, global problems, whether it's an epidemic or whether it's the rise of artificial intelligence.

So like when there was this COVID-19 pandemic, it threatened all the people in the world.

And countries exchange information about how to deal with it.

If one country developed a medicine or a vaccine that can protect people, then it benefited other countries as well.

And think this should be to have at the same time our own local,

individual, national stories and the big stories that help all the people in the world cooperate towards common goals.

And you know, I try not to be either optimist or pessimist.

Pessimist, you say, oh, everything is doomed,

there is nothing we can do, you're going to die, and then you do nothing, because you think there is nothing you can do.

I'm being too much optimist, then everything will be okay, don't worry, then also, we don't do anything, because everything will be okay, why bother?

The middle path is to be a realist, to understand that we are facing really big challenges.

But that also we are still very powerful, we have everything we need in order to deal with these challenges.

So we have to be very realistic about it, and then do something like that.

like take the responsibility, and we created most of the problems, so it's our responsibility to solve them, to fix them.

And I hope that this is the conclusion that we take from everything we talked about here,

that we are the most powerful force on the planet,

that's not the elephants, not whales, not lions, they can't stop us if we make a mistake.

It's our responsibility to stop ourselves from doing stupid things, from behaving irresponsible in an eye.

And of course,

none of us can do it by ourselves, it's not on the shoulders of any just one person to save the world, that's impossible.

We should each do whatever we can with the limited power and the limited wisdom that we have.

And together we can use our powers wisely.

Create a better world for not just all the humans,

but for all the inhabitants of planet Earth So thank you very much for listening and for being You

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