Now, people-some people-corporations, governments are gaming the technology to hack human beings. But we didn't pay a very high cost for believing in this myth in the 19th and 20th century because nobody had a technology to actually do it.
#YUVAL NOAH HARARI. FREE#
Ultimately, my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody can access that or touch that. Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, that ultimate authority is, as Tristan said, is with the feelings of human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human choices are these sacred arena which cannot be hacked, which cannot be manipulated. Because we have built our society, certainly liberal democracy with elections and the free market and so forth, on philosophical ideas from the 18th century which are simply incompatible not just with the scientific findings of the 21st century but above all with the technology we now have at our disposal. YNH: I think that we are now facing really, not just a technological crisis, but a philosophical crisis. Could technology be hacking human feelings, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors to keep people engaged with products? And I think that's the thing that we both share is that the human mind is not the total secure enclave root of authority that we think it is, and if we want to treat it that way we're going to have to understand what needs to be protected first. And then I was at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford that teaches engineering students how you apply the principles of persuasion to technology. So somehow there's this discipline which is about universal exploits on all human minds. It's not like, Oh, if you speak Japanese I can't do this trick on you, it's not going to work. It doesn’t matter whether they have a PhD, whether they’re a nuclear physicist, what age they are.
WIREDīut my whole background: I actually spent the last 10 years studying persuasion, starting when I was a magician as a kid, where you learn that there are things that work on all human minds. Yuval Noah Harari, left, and Tristan Harris with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson. This transcript has been edited for clarity. As Harari said, “We are now facing not just a technological crisis but a philosophical crisis.” They are two of the smartest people in the world of tech, and each spoke eloquently about self-knowledge and how humans can make themselves harder to hack. I had the chance to speak with Harari, the author of three best-selling books, and Tristan Harris, who runs the Center for Humane Technology and who has played a substantial role in making “time well spent” perhaps the most-debated phrase in Silicon Valley in 2018.
(And they’ll certainly know them before you’ve told your mother.) An advertiser in the future might know your sexual preferences before they are clear to you.
#YUVAL NOAH HARARI. HOW TO#
YouTube knows how to keep you staring at the screen long past when it’s in your interest to stop. But then, says Yuval Noah Harari, another competitor joins the race: "You have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back." Amazon will soon know when you need lightbulbs right before they burn out. As you get older, you begin to understand things about your mind that even she doesn’t know. When you are 2 years old, your mother knows more about you than you know yourself.