This interdependence between technology and systems of government is a new idea for me. It hadn't really occurred to me until you said it just earlier that we needed the printing press to have large-scale democracies. This could quite possibly make us very concerned about the evolution of a country like China, where artificial intelligence combined with surveillance technology maps onto such a state.
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher whose books — "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," and most recently "Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World" — have sold more than 40 million copies. He joins Rufus for a wide-ranging conversation about storytelling, life in the Stone Age, the future of democracy, and the threat of AI.
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