The Problem of Hacking Human Feelings

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

When our feelings are perfectly getting this kind of pleasure or positive response, who's to say where the problem is? We're much easier to morally respond negatively when we know we're being constrained. And it actually gets easier and easier to simulate comments that would match us because our own language is down grating. So there's this weird loop where the smarter the technology gets, the dumber the humans get.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.