NT: And, Yuval, we got into this point by you saying that this scares you for democracy. And it makes you worry whether democracy can survive, or I believe you say the phrase you use in your book is: Democracy will become a puppet show. Explain that.

YNH: Yeah, I mean, if it doesn't adapt to these new realities, it will become just an emotional puppet show. If you go on with this illusion that human choice cannot be hacked, cannot be manipulated, and we can just trust it completely, and this is the source of all authority, then very soon you end up with an emotional puppet show.

And this is one of the greatest dangers that we are facing and it really is the result of a kind of philosophical impoverishment of just taking for granted philosophical ideas from the 18th century and not updating them with the findings of science. And it's very difficult because you go to people—people don't want to hear this message that they are hackable animals, that their choices, their desires, their understanding of who am I, what are my most authentic aspirations, these can actually be hacked and manipulated. To put it briefly, my amygdala may be working for Putin. I don't want to know this. I don't want to believe that. No, I'm a free agent. If I'm afraid of something, this is because of me. Not because somebody planted this fear in my mind. If I choose something, this is my free will, And who are you to tell me anything else?

NT: Well I'm hoping that Putin will soon be working for my amygdala, but that's a side project I have going. But it seems inevitable, from what you wrote in your first book, that we would reach this point, where human minds would be hackable and where computers and machines and AI would have better understandings of us. But it's certainly not inevitable that it would lead us to negative outcomes—to 9/11 conspiracy theories and a broken democracy. So have we reached the point of no return? How do we avoid the point of no return if we haven't reached there? And what are the key decision points along the way?

YNH: Well nothing is inevitable in that. I mean the technology itself is going to develop. You can't just stop all research in AI and you can’t stop all research in biotech. And the two go together. I think that AI gets too much attention now, and we should put equal emphasis on what's happening on the biotech front because in order to hack human beings, you need biology and some of the most important tools and insights, they are not coming from computer science, they are coming from brain science. And many of the people who design all these amazing algorithms, they have a background in psychology and brain science because this is what you're trying to hack. But what should we realize? We can use the technology in many different ways. I mean for example we now are using AI mainly in order to surveil individuals in the service of corporations and governments. But it can be flipped to the opposite direction. We can use the same surveillance systems to control the government in the service of individuals, to monitor, for example, government officials that they are not corrupt. The technology is willing to do that. The question is whether we're willing to develop the necessary tools to do it.

"To put it briefly, my amygdala may be working for Putin." Yuval Noah Harari

TH: I Think one of Yuval’s major points here is that the biotech lets you understand by hooking up a sensor to someone features about that person that they won't know about themselves, and they're increasingly reverse-engineering the human animal. One of the interesting things that I've been following is also the ways you can ascertain those signals without an invasive sensor. And we were talking about this a second ago. There's something called Eulerian Video magnification where you point a computer camera at a person's face. Then if I put a supercomputer behind the camera, I can actually run a mathematical equation, and I can find the micro pulses of blood to your face that I as a human can’t see but that the computer can see, so I can pick up your heart rate. What does that let me do? I can pick up your stress level because heart rate variability gives me your stress level. I can point—there's a woman named Poppy Crum who gave a TED talk this year about the end of the poker face, that we had this idea that there can be a poker face, we can actually hide our emotions from other people. But this talk is about the erosion of that, that we can point a camera at your eyes and see when your eyes dilate, which actually detects cognitive strains—when you're having a hard time understanding something or an easy time understanding something. We can continually adjust this based on your heart rate, your eye dilation. You know, one of the things with Cambridge Analytica is the idea—you know, which is all about the hacking of Brexit and Russia and all the other US elections—that was based on, if I know your big five personality traits, if I know Nick Thompson's personality through his openness, conscientiousness, extrovertedness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, that gives me your personality. And based on your personality, I can tune a political message to be perfect for you. Now the whole scandal there was that Facebook let go of this data to be stolen by a researcher who used to have people fill in questionnaires to figure out what are Nick’s big five personality traits? But now there's a woman named Gloria Mark at UC Irvine who has done research showing you can actually get people's big five personality traits just by their click patterns alone, with 80 percent accuracy. So again, the end of the poker face, the end of the hidden parts of your personality. We're going to be able to point AIs at human animals and figure out more and more signals from them including their micro expressions, when you smirk and all these things, we've got face ID cameras on all of these phones. So now if you have a tight loop where I can adjust the political messages in real time to your heart rate and to your eye dilation and to your political personality. That's not a world that you want to live in. It's a kind of dystopia.