What would a future in which Donald Trump helms America for a second term and the march of AI continues unabated look like? Complicated, and more unequal than ever before, according to Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and author, most recently of Nexus (Penguin Random House). In this interview with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group, Harari, 48, speaks of the erosion of trust that propels populism and damages democracy, the impact of AI on interpersonal relationships, why religion will need to change if it has to stay relevant and the one lesson Benjamin Netanyahu needs to learn. Edited excerpts: Donald Trump defines power as fear. What, according to you, is power in the year 2025? The question is, what do you do with power? Do you use power to gain more power, or do you try to use power in order to change the world for the better, to improve people’s lives? And that’s always the big question in politics. Unfortunately, at the present moment, we have too many politicians who think about power as just a means to gain more power, and this has always been the danger in democracy. Democracy is a system in which you give power to somebody on condition that after four years or so, they give it back, and the public can make another decision, did you use your power wisely and compassionately for four years? Okay, then we give it again, or, if not, we give it to somebody else. The question is always, what happens if you give power to somebody who doesn’t want to give it back, they now have all the power they can use it to just stay in power. And I think the American public had made a very big gamble, very big risk giving so much power to Trump, who already proved that he wants to stay in power at all cost. So we will see what happens. Why do you think the American people did that? Populist political movements are not new. if you look back in history and today, is there one common element that sparks political populist movements? I think at the heart of populism there is a distrust of humanity, a distrust of human beings. You see it both on the radical right and also on the radical left. They have different ideas about many things, but one thing unites them, it is thinking that the only reality is power and that all human interactions are power struggles. They don’t believe, populists, that humans and human institutions really care about the truth. In the populist imagination, when I’m now talking with you, this is a power struggle. Everything we say is just trying to manipulate each other or to manipulate the viewers. So the question to ask whenever you hear somebody say something, is not, is it true? What is the evidence? The question to ask is, who is winning, who is gaining power, whose interests are being served? This view of humanity as if all humans are power-crazy demons, this erodes trust in human beings, it erodes trust in institutions, in the media, in university, in courts. People think these are just conspiracies of people to gain power. And if you lose trust in all institutions, democracy collapses. Democracy functions based on trust. If there is no trust, the only system that can still function is a dictatorship. Because dictatorship is built on terror, not on trust. You need to frighten people, not make them trust. Now the main thing to say about this populist worldview is that it’s not just very cynical, it’s simply wrong. Yes, humans are interested in power to some extent, but every human being also has an authentic, deep yearning for the truth. We really want to know the truth about the world. Why? Because if you don’t know the truth about life, you will never be happy because you don’t know what are the true sources of your misery. Even if you are the most powerful person in the world, if you don’t know the truth about life, you will waste all your power trying to solve the wrong problems. We should approach the world with a more generous view of human beings and human institutions, that, yes, some human beings are corrupt, sometimes some people lie. But this is not the basic situation of humanity. You used the phrase ‘human misery’. So are we getting disillusioned quicker? Regimes lasted 300-400 years, do people get fed up of the regime faster today than they used to? History is accelerating. and being fed up (is) one of the deep truths about human nature. The deep, basic reaction of the mind to pleasant experiences is not satisfaction, but craving for more, right? So, the better things become, the more people are dissatisfied. They have more desires, more cravings. Is that what we see in America? They have been successful. They have commanded the attention of the world for over 50 years, yet people are fed up with the Western model of liberal democracy? That’s the amazing thing. Trump’s slogan is Make America Great Again; as if America is not great. But you look at America in recent years, during Biden’s time, it is by far the biggest economy. China is in trouble. Europe is in trouble. America is doing great. You look at the military. The US military is, by far, the strongest in the world. You look at the AI race, which is at the centre of the book I wrote, and United States is winning the AI race, which will make America even more powerful, economically, culturally and militarily. And yet, Americans are so dissatisfied, so angry, so fearful. You look at the long span of history, and in terms of health, nutrition, security, countries like the United States, France, Germany, this is the best place in (their) history and people are so dissatisfied. Is spirituality an answer to this dissatisfaction. Or is it something that actually makes you polarise more and creates more dissatisfaction? It depends on if you mean spirituality or religion. The problem of real spirituality is that it doesn’t scale. I’m surprised you’re saying that because you are from Israel and you travel every year, three hours away from Mumbai, to do Vipassana. How many people there are in India or in Israel. how many of them really go on these deep spiritual journeys? Religion scales, spirituality doesn’t? Yes, religion scales. Spirituality is when you ask a big question about life. What is reality? What is good? And you go on a very deep, sometimes difficult journey to find the answers. And no matter what obstacle you encounter, you go on. Religion is when people are kind of tired or give up on the spiritual quest and they just get a ready-made answer. Like somebody says, this is the answer to the big question. Take it, believe it. You cannot question it. And you just believe it, blind belief. This scales. You can make a billion people chant some answer. Every time you try to scale (spiritual traditions). it’s not an individual or a small group. …It gets adulterated, loses authenticity?. Yes, because people become attached to rites and rituals, beliefs, they forget about the true essence of the spiritual path, and then it becomes a religion, and it often leads to more conflict. You know the best test for a spiritual tradition or a spiritual place, like a temple or a synagogue is: does it bring peace or conflict? If you have a temple and you have lots of people fighting over it, it means it’s not functioning well. So this is a very simple test. And you see it like in Jerusalem, (it’s) supposed to be the holiest place on earth, the most spiritual place. so many wars. If it’s so spiritual, how come it causes so much bloodshed? I like to believe India is at the heart of any devout place. (from) your time in India and your exposure to spirituality in India, does India has some kind of learning for the world? I’m not an expert on comparing spiritual traditions. I myself found the deepest answers in my life, on my spiritual path, from a tradition that started in India with the Buddha, and my teacher, SN Goenka, he learned it in Burma, in Myanmar. So this is why I come every year, to take a long meditation retreat here. But I wouldn’t like to comment, or give ranks. Based on your books, I have a few questions about the future of some ideas. What will be the future of religion and what should be the future of religion? Religion will continue to change. I mean, people think that religion is some kind of eternal truth. But if you look at any religion, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, it changes all the time. People deny the change. But, it’s the same eternal truth. You take a Jew today, you take a Jew 1,000-2,000 years ago. They believe in different things. They dress differently. They behave differently. So, religion will continue to change, to adapt to new realities like the rise of AI will also change religion. And it should? If it wants to survive, it has to change. If you don’t change, you don’t survive. What will be the future of romantic love and what should be the future of romantic love? I’m putting it in the context of AI. I think we will see more and more intervention of technology of AI in human relationships. Even humans getting into relationships with AIs. I don’t think that AIs have consciousness, that they have feelings or emotions. But they become very good at creating fake feelings and fake emotions, fooling us to think that there is another conscious entity. So, I think we will see more and more of that. And this is very dangerous, we have to be very careful about that. We should be able to keep AI out of our personal interpersonal lives. The key about relationships, especially romantic relationships, (is that) if it’s only focused on you, (on) ‘I want to feel better’, then AI could be the perfect companion because it knows your own feelings and it focuses on you. But real relationship is not about me. Real relationship is I’m in the relationship because I want that the other person I care about. And if AI has no feelings, I cannot have a real relationship that is going both ways with something that has no feelings. What’s the future of inequality? One of the big dangers (is) we will see much greater inequality than ever before. Because you have a few countries that lead the AI revolution, it’s mostly the USA and China, all other countries are far behind. So, like in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, that a few countries like Britain and France and Japan, they led the Industrial Revolution, they conquered and exploited the whole world. The same thing is likely to happen, maybe on an even bigger scale with AI. You look at the United States. So very few people understand the AI revolution. Very few people make the key decisions about the future of everybody. And these people, you know, like Elon Musk and the leaders of Silicon Valley, they are not elected by anybody. And maybe they are making the most important decisions in the history of the world. The creation of AIs, of new agents, more intelligent than us, of a new species that might take over the world. One of the reasons I wrote Nexus is to have more people understand what is the AI revolution, what is happening, so more people from all over the world can join the debate and voice their opinions. One of the things that I think about India is that we are a very hierarchical place. Employee-employer; guru-shishya; old-young; hierarchy matters in India. then there’s the American way, which is so attractive and captures the imagination of the world: everything is equal. So is equality a universal value? Is it thought about differently in America than in India? The ideal of equality is very attractive all over the world because it is based on a deep truth. Yes, that all humans are essentially the same, biologically we are all the same. We have the same bodies. We have the same mental and physical capabilities. Culture creates all these differences. Oh, you’re from this group. You’re from this caste. You’re from this gender. So you are higher. You are lower. All of this is human imagination. Of course, human imagination changes the world. Because of our imagination, we give some group better education, more money, more positions. (they) become more powerful, more educated. This is not coming from biology. This is coming from our imagination. Can we embrace diversity and equality? The big debate is between equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes. Equality of outcomes is just impossible. When you try to do it, the only thing that can try is a totalitarian regime. Because you constantly have to kind of manage everybody. What we can aspire to more is at least equality of opportunities. It will never be the same outcome for everybody. But it is unfair if a child born today to a very poor family and a child born to a very rich family, the poor child will not get any education and will not have any opportunities. Why? So at least we should aspire to create more opportunities for more people. Do you think one reason for all the populist movements around the world is this feeling that we want equality and we’re going to change the regime, change all the institutions? Sometimes they say so, but many of the policies of populist regimes around the world, they encourage hierarchy and they encourage inequality. What’s the future of money and what should be the future of money? That’s a very important question. Money is about trust. Money is a system of mutual trust between people, maybe the most sophisticated system of trust ever devised. That two people who never met, complete foreigners, maybe from different countries, they can still trade, they can still make a co-operation based on money. And now we see the rise of new crypto-currencies like Bitcoin which are, to some extent, based on distrust that you don’t trust the banks, you don’t trust the government. So, instead you trust technology. This becomes the basis of the money. The dollar is based on trust in human institutions. Bitcoin is based on trust in technology. So it’s another sign that humans are losing trust in other humans and instead trying to base their trust on technology and this is a very dangerous development. What should happen? Should we not be innovative with technology? Or, stick to the old dollar and stick to the old way? No, you can definitely have digital. Most dollars already are digital. Yeah, I mean, hardly anybody uses cash anymore for anything. So the question is not whether the money is digital or physical, it’s all becoming digital. The question is, what is the basis for the trust in the money? I mean, with the dollar, people say, I trust human institutions like the Federal Reserve or the US government, so I trust the dollar. Crypto is rebelling that, crypto is saying I don’t trust. Yes, crypto is saying I don’t trust human institutions. I put my trust only in technology. And a world in which humans don’t trust other humans, I mean, that’s the whole trend of AI. Like what you see, you have this kind of AI arms race. And you talk with the people leading the big AI companies, and they tell you we have to move faster and faster because we don’t trust the other humans. But then you ask them, but do you think you’ll be able to trust the AIs you’re creating? And they say, yes. And this is the paradox because we should have no trust in other humans than in this completely new alien AI intelligence. A few quick ones, I can see my time’s running out. What wins? Religion or spirituality? In history, religion wins. Because spirituality doesn’t scale. But if you want to be happy, religion won’t help you. It’s spirituality that will. What wins: justice or revenge? Justice; you can’t have a large scale society based on revenge. And we see large scale societies all over the world. So, despite the power of revenge, humans have learned how to seek justice and not revenge. Is there a peaceful, sustainable ending to the Israel conflict? Yes, if people want. The conflict doesn’t come from physics or biology, from the laws of nature, it comes from beliefs in people’s minds. And if people change their beliefs, the conflict will end, but of course it’s very difficult to make people change their beliefs. The one prediction or trend that you think you were wrong about? I didn’t expect that people will give up on the system that brought peace to the world so quickly and so easily. The early 21st century was the most peaceful era in human history. It wasn’t because of a miracle. It was because people built institutions and the rule-based order. And it has been the biggest political achievement maybe in history. And people just gave it up. are in the process of just giving it up. You’re talking about liberalism and liberal democracies. No, I’m talking about the international system, which also includes autocracies. But there was somebody on top of that international system. It’s just not just one person. You see it all over the world. That people just. I think, again, it’s something deep in human nature that the good things you just take for granted. Like when your knee is working well, you don’t think about it. You just know the knee. Then it starts feeling pain. You remember, oh, I have a knee. It’s the same with the relative order and the peace of the world, that people just took it for granted. Now it’s collapsing. And instead of order, we get chaos. And it was so difficult to build. It was an imperfect order. And I didn’t think that people would be so stupid to give up so quickly this achievement. The one historical lesson you’d want to read to Donald Trump? I’m not sure that he’s really interested in historical lessons. Even so, any one lesson from history? You know, the most basic lesson. that he’s going to die like everybody else. So all this pursuit of power and attention, it will lead him nowhere. And I think if he remembers his own, you know, his own transience, like I can almost guarantee him that in a couple of hundred years nobody would remember him. Like how many Mughal emperors. people in the United States remember, how many Byzantine emperors people remember, very very few. So they all get forgotten. Benjamin Netanyahu, the one lesson that you’d want to tell him. The basic lesson, you know, Jews have been a persecuted minority for 2,000 years. And this was the deepest lesson that Jews learned. That you don’t worship power. That you need more compassion. And Netanyahu and his people, everything the Jewish people have learned over 2,000 years, they forgot within two generations.
