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The Current Transcript for September 17, 2024

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: What worries me most is the kind of unknown unknowns. If you can anticipate it, it's not really an AI. The dangers we can anticipate are, in a way, the lesser evil.

MATT GALLOWAY: Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, not a computer scientist, but the bestselling big thinker has seen enough over the sweep of history to be deeply worried about the impact of artificial intelligence. Hariri's new book, Nexus, explores how information networks over time have been weaponized and manipulated and how that could be supercharged through AI. In 30 minutes, Yuval Noah Harari on robot coffee machines, life in the algorithm and the difference between information and the truth. Also this morning:

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[German speech]

SPEAKER: For me, it's like a ping-pong. I receive a word from Tina and I answer. Tina says ping, I say pong.

MG: It is a long-distance relationship sustained by language. Every day, two women, one in Germany, the other in Toronto, friends for 40 years, exchanged the briefest of notes. In an hour, Alisa Siegel's documentary, One Word. But we begin with another liberal byelection loss at a time when the government hangs by a thread. Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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After Montreal byelection loss, is any Liberal seat safe?

Guests: Emilie Nicolas

MG: As you're hearing in the news, it is another byelection upset for Justin Trudeau's Liberals. The Bloc Québécois' Louis-Philippe Sauvé, beat out Liberal candidate Laura Palestini by just a couple hundred votes in a Montreal riding that has been held by the Liberals for most of the last century. The NDP was a close third in that riding, but it did keep its seat in a Winnipeg byelection. Joining me now to discuss the result in Montreal is Emilie Nicolas, a columnist for Le Devoir. She's in Montreal. Emilie, good morning.

EMILIE NICOLAS: Good morning.

MG: Just 250 votes separates the Liberal and the Bloc candidates here. People will say byelections are just byelections, it's not a general election. Doesn't mean anything. From your perspective, what does this loss in this riding tell you about the Federal Liberals and Justin Trudeau?

EMILIE NICOLAS: The key word here is instability. And you have had that, especially in Quebec. But you have a really good example of that instability here. You have, essentially, three-way vote splitting. The margin between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, as you said, is just a couple hundred votes. But so, it is between the Liberals and the NDP that arrive third. We essentially have people who won or lost a seat essentially by a margin that could be related to just how well-organized are their get out to vote effort or how mobilized were their base. But really, it is something that is very hard to predict. And we have also seen an example of that last night when the NDP just around midnight, was basically already celebrating victory and we only had a final vote count happening very late in the night, around 2:45 in the morning. And so, when you see things like that, you know that politics is going to be very, very hard to predict because there's too many players that are workable or are in the race. And that makes in our electoral system a lot of races very, very unstable. And there's going to be a lot of that to follow in the future, especially in the Montreal region.

MG: This is a seat, as I mentioned, that was held by the Liberals for close to a century. Comes three months after a Toronto byelection loss for the Liberals in another so-called safe seat. Is your sense that any seat is safe for the Liberals right now?

EMILIE NICOLAS: No, it isn't. There are obviously some seats that are safer than others, but there could be a lot of mood swings in the electorate in the next couple of months or as we already have now. What's really interesting for me in this race is that a lot of people were basically trying to paint that as a race between the Liberal and the NDP, with the NDP having a very high likeliness of winning, and they came out third. And so, at this point, what we need, I think, to understand is that there is a lot of instability that is due to people not necessarily feeling like they belong or that they can relate to the theatre that has been happening in the House of Commons. And that's just not me saying this. There was a really interesting study poll by Angus Reid just last week that was showing that a lot of Canadians simply do not identify or relate with the political parties. What's interesting is that the Bloc Québécois has been essentially very low profile in the last years. They have been locked out of being a significant player in terms of vote in this minority parliament because of the agreement between the Liberals and the NDP. And they have not been in the media even here in Quebec. And so, I think a lot of the votes that went to the Bloc Québécois might be just votes that are about-- a shrug of the shoulder. A 'nah' vote for everybody else, because essentially the Bloc Québécois has been staying out of the theatre, staying out of politics. And that's something that Yves-François Blanchet said last night that they were, quote unquote, 'The adult in the room.' And so, it's not necessarily a vote for the Bloc Québécois. Not necessarily a vote for their ideas or the sovereigntist ideas. I think a lot of it might just be a 'none of the above' kind of vote. And that's something that will need to be factored in by the other political parties as they're heading back to parliament.

MG: Just let me ask you finally, on Saturday, Justin Trudeau was on Montreal private radio. He said, I'm not going anywhere. Does that change now? As you have been talking about here and elsewhere, I mean, there has been pressure from MPs, some MPs, and it's been quiet. There hasn't been any sort of overt rebellion yet, but people have been saying, wondering whether the party could win a general election with him as leader. Others saying he is the leader, and he will lead this party into that election. Does any of that change in light of this second byelection loss?

EMILIE NICOLAS: The thing about politics is it's not about the numbers. It's very much a human science. And so, the numbers tell a story. But what people read in the numbers is going to be what determines the future of the leadership of Justin Trudeau. If Liberal MPs decide to panic when they see their numbers, that panic in and of itself could well create a-- will rock the boat for the Liberal leadership. If they decide that they haven't lost by that much, that it was very, very close and that they can still pull this off if they make an effort and that this session is just starting, then it means that they will likely do better at least a little bit in the next couple of months. It's really a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that there's a catastrophe impending, then you will behave in a way that will make your political option seen as more chaotic. And that will, in and of itself, create a lack of trust in the sense that Justin Trudeau needs to go. And so, I will be watching for how the Liberal caucus, especially in the Montreal region, reacts to the result. And that will be telling me whether or not the results are sending a signal in one direction or the other.

MG: As you say, these results came in late in the night, early in the morning for some. I appreciate you walking through what we know about this byelection. Emilie, thank you very much.

EMILIE NICOLAS: Thank you.

MG: Emilie Nicolas is a columnist with Le Devoir. She was in Montreal.

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Fears of political violence growing in U.S.

Guests: Aaron Blake, Bruce Hoffman

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio. My name is Matt Galloway.

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JD VANCE: If you tell the American people that this person is the end of democracy, if you tell the American people that this person needs to be eliminated, most of them, thank God, are going to ignore you. But some crazy person is going to take matters into their own hands and actually listen to the crazy rhetoric that you're putting out there. No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out. Somebody is going to get hurt by it and it's going to destroy this country.

MG: That's J.D. Vance, Donald Trump's running mate, speaking yesterday in Atlanta. Former U.S. President Donald Trump is also blaming his opponents for an apparent assassination attempt at one of his golf courses in Florida. Authorities caught the suspect. There's an ongoing FBI investigation, and this attack comes at a time of growing fears of more political violence in the United States, as the countdown to Election Day continues. Aaron Blake is a senior political reporter for The Washington Post. Aaron, good morning.

AARON BLAKE: Good morning.

MG: The suspect in this, Ryan Wesley Routh, was charged with gun crimes yesterday in a Florida court. What do we know about him so far?

AARON BLAKE: Well, it's still kind of being pieced together. There are social media accounts that apparently belonged to him in which he expressed support for Trump back in 2016 but seemed to turn against him later. There is evidence of him expressing support for various Democrats who are running, as well as various Republicans who are running in the primary this time around. So, it doesn't seem to really fit into a neat box. And he did seem to be motivated, I should add, by support for Ukraine. He-- there is a big Wall Street Journal story today about how he went overseas in an effort to help with that effort. So, that seemed to be an issue that was important to him and an issue where he perhaps differed from Trump in certain ways. So, we're still piecing it all together, but those seem to be the highlights so far.

MG: He apparently was in the area around this golf course for something like 12 hours before a Secret Service agents spotted his rifle and opened fire. How-- again, this comes in the wake of the shooting just a few months ago. What do we know about how he was able to get so close to Donald Trump for so long?

AARON BLAKE: Well, this is something that my colleagues here at The Washington Post have been reporting on. Ever since Donald Trump's first assassination attempt, there have been, you know, discussions about the Secret Service and whether they're protecting him enough, whether the precautions are being taken. And my colleagues have reported that the golf course was something that the Secret Service flagged as something that is, quite frankly, very difficult for them to secure because it is a large piece of property. It is accessible to the public. There are people who golf there who are not the president and his friends. And so, it just creates a situation where there is a large perimeter that needs to be secured. And in this case, it seems that this person anticipated that he would be there, even though it wasn't publicly announced. He hung around for a long time. And ultimately, he was was found near the scene. I should add, it's a very big area, a golf course, of course. And so, it's just, it's another question we're asking. And apparently the Secret Service has told the Trump campaign that this is a difficult area for them to secure.

MG: We heard J.D. Vance's comments just a moment ago from Atlanta. Donald Trump has spoken about this in similar terms as well. What else have Republicans said about this?

AARON BLAKE: Yeah, you know, after the first assassination attempt, there were kind of suggestions initially that maybe this shooter was motivated by Democrats rhetoric. It was much more of a slow build towards that conclusion, which, you know, Trump and others ultimately arrived at. I think the difference this time is that they arrived at that conclusion much more quickly. They blamed Democrats much more quickly for what transpired. And I should add, you know, we still really don't know, especially in the case of the first shooter, what might have motivated him. He did not leave an extensive paper trail. He was a registered Republican. So, there is some danger here in jumping to conclusions before the evidence is out there. But certainly, it's something that has been raising the temperature even more in our politics down here.

MG: What happened to that idea of lowering the temperature? I mean, after that first shooting, there was the talk of trying to figure out a way to reduce some of the rhetoric. What happened to that?

AARON BLAKE: Yeah, you know, I think that Democrats for a time, you know, the the big talking point that Republicans talked about after the first assassination attempt was, you know, the idea that Trump is a threat to democracy and a danger to the country is beyond the pale and could have motivated this shooter. Again, there remains no evidence that that is the case. But, you know, Democrats have kind of backed away from that kind of rhetoric. It's not clear they viewed it as dangerous or inciting or something like that, or they just decided to focus on other issues. And meantime, we have seen Donald Trump and his allies use much of the same kind of rhetoric that they now say is inciting. You know, J.D. Vance yesterday was talking about how, you know, Democrats are calling Trump a fascist, and that's dangerous. Well, Donald Trump over the last eight days has also used that word against Democrats. And so, you know, there is a lot of overheated rhetoric. There's a lot of partisan bickering about this. It is certainly not a moment of unity for the country. And I think it's something that is causing us all to wonder about how ugly things are going to get in the weeks to come.

MG: Aaron, it's good to talk to you, as always. Appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

AARON BLAKE: Thank you.

MG: Aaron Blake is a senior political reporter with The Washington Post. Political violence and threats of violence have been, as Aaron suggested, on the rise in the U.S. for several years. There was the attack on U.S. house Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband inside their home by a far-right conspiracy theorist. Of course, the violent mobs who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021 protesting Donald Trump's election loss. And opinion polls have consistently found that a rising proportion of Americans believe violence is a valid means to achieve their political goals. Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism at Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is called God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. Bruce, good morning to you.

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How concerned are you about the current political atmosphere, what Aaron was just describing?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Very concerned. In fact, the book you just mentioned was published last January. And one of our conclusions in the book was that no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election, there'll be violence. We stepped back from a prediction of civil war, which some people have argued, but exactly the kind of violence that you just discussed with The Washington Post reporter has unfortunately become commonplace.

MG: We don't know the motive definitively in either of these cases, but are you surprised that it's Donald Trump who is being targeted at his rally in July and now, apparently, at this golf course?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: No, because the country is just so polarized and so deeply divided. And we face yet another election that will be won by a whisker. No, it's not surprising. And it's a product of just the increasingly heated rhetoric, which you just discussed, but even more so, social media. I mean, social media just populates the Internet with various memes, with various remarks, with various calls to battle that unfortunately influence, motivate, and ultimately animate people to think that they're perfectly in the right to use violence in pursuit of their political choices.

MG: What's the role of politicians in that? When politicians are amplifying far-right rhetoric about defending the United States against so-called immigrant invasions. Talking about threats to, you know, the existence of the United States itself because of who might be arriving in the country. What is the impact of that rhetoric, do you think?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Well, words matter. I mean, we see that this is a phenomenon not just restricted to the United States. That heated rhetoric, that false information about immigrants, whether illegal or legal immigrants, have sparked violent disorders in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in recent months. And in the United States, as well, this has become a very emotional issue on both sides. It used to be more or less confined to the border. But now, as we've seen in recent weeks, because of these reports of supposedly, allegedly, I should say, false reports of Haitian immigrants eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio, they've, once again, over social media, have assumed a life and therefore veracity of their own that's completely divorced from reality.

MG: And you have real world impacts of that. I mean, there are bomb threats. There are schools that are shut down because of those false stories circulating online and beyond.

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Well, this is the problem. You hit the nail on the head. You've got an atmosphere where people can just phone in a threat, and it has paralytic effects. But also remember, in the United States, this is a remarkably well-armed country. There are 123 firearms for every 100 Americans. That's more than the next 25 countries combined. Number two on the list, at 53 firearms per 100 people, is Yemen, which we could all agree is a violent country enmeshed in its own civil war. So, the problem in the United States is that if you have these extreme views or if you're influenced by the rhetoric, you can actually do something about it. I mean, just like this individual in Florida, you can go out and get an assault weapon and stake out a president. Or, as we saw in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.

MG: How normalized, I mean, I said in the introduction that opinion polls have consistently found a rising proportion of Americans believe violence is a valid means to achieve their political goals. How normalized is this?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: I think that's the unfortunate development. It's become more and more normalized. When The Washington Post and the University of Maryland four years ago began to survey Americans on whether there would be any circumstances where they could envision violence being used against the federal government. Bear in mind that in a democracy, there shouldn't be any circumstances where violence is authorized. In that first poll, it was roughly 33 per cent or a third or so of people who have identified themselves as Republicans, and about 24 per cent of people identified themselves as Democrats. Both concluded that violence was acceptable. Now, those figures have fluctuated over the past four years, and currently it's about one in five Americans believe that they may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track. That's an astonishing figure given that we live in a democracy that is predicated on free and fair elections. But it shows how since 2016, there's been an erosion, firstly, in the faith of our democracy and in the faith of our electoral system. And then as politicians have amped up the rhetoric, it has had this impact, of whether it's former President Trump calling the Democratic Party communists or marxists, which obviously is incorrect. But also, as you noted earlier, on the Democratic side, you know, President Biden and Vice President Harris talking about this being an existential election that will affect the future of democracy. I mean, there are people that act on that rhetoric and believe that if we're in an existential crisis, well, therefore, as Americans, we have to do something. And of course, that's a tradition that goes back to 1776, and the American Revolution, where ordinary citizens took up firearms against what they regarded as a tyrannical government.

MG: So, I have to let you go, but just, I mean, with under, you know, two months until the election, are you at all confident that the rhetoric will settle itself down? Or, is it just going to go in the opposite direction?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: The stakes are so big in this election and the race is so close, I can't imagine that there'll be any dampening down of the rhetoric, at least on one side. Whether both sides calm down is another question. But using terms like, 'there'll be a bloodbath,' for example, in the United States, and then saying that president, former President Trump used in the spring, [unclear] is talking about if there's imported automobiles. Or that there'll be death and destruction if he's indicted. We're already at the precipice. I'm not sure that we can really step back from it. And as I said at the beginning, when the actual election comes, whoever is elected, I think, will trigger violence of one sort or another.

MG: Bruce, thank you very much.

BRUCE HOFFMAN: You're very welcome.

MG: Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is called God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. The CBC News is next.

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MG: And then he talked a little bit about social media and the way that some of those thoughts are torqued through the ways that we consume information. Yuval Noah Harari has been thinking about that as well. He's an historian. I spoke with him onstage on Friday about artificial intelligence and the weaponization of information. And you'll hear some of that conversation coming up in six minutes right here on The Current.

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Yuval Noah Harari on the true threat of AI

Guests: Yuval Noah Harari

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. If you've ever wondered why human beings are so smart that we can send men to the moon but so stupid that we can't make peace on Earth, well, you have something in common with Yuval Noah Harari. It is a question that has consumed him, inspired a series of bestselling books. And as you're going to hear, he thinks he now has the answer. I had the chance to speak with Yuval Noah Harari onstage last week as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. His new book is called Nexis: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Here's the first part of our conversation.

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MG: This is a book of our time in many ways. It is about something that is arriving, something that is here, something that people believe will reshape the world, something that people are already terrified of. It's also about information networks more broadly. And you were very specific in terms of defining that term. What do you mean when you say an information network? What to you is an information network?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Well, the key thing about information is that information is not truth, as many people tend tend to think, especially in places like Silicon Valley, most information in the world is fiction and fantasies and delusions and so forth. The main function of information is to connect a lot of individuals into a network. An army, a church, a tribe, a state, a corporation, a market. They are connected by information. Sometimes the information that connects them is the truth, but not always. And very often it's easier to connect people with fiction. If you think, for instance, about images, portraits, what is the most common portrait in the world? What is the most famous face in history? It's the face of Jesus. There are billions and billions of portraits of Jesus created over the last 2000 years in churches and cathedrals and private houses. And all of them are inauthentic. None of them is true because we have no idea how Jesus actually looked like. There's not a single portrait that survived from his own lifetime, if anybody made a portrait. And there is not a single word in the Bible that describes him. Not a single word. There is one description of his clothes, but not of the man himself. We don't know if he was tall or short, thin or fat, if he had black hair or blonde hair or if he was bald. Nothing. All the portraits are fictional, and nevertheless, they have been important in creating one of the most influential and powerful networks in human history.

MG: Why is it important that we think of that as a social phenomenon? That information is a social issue. Because currently-- we will talk about social networks-- but this is not something new. The way that information has been is used, and you're kind of hinting at it there, but the way that information used over time has been a social issue.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Because we are a social species. Our power in the world doesn't come from our individual genius or our individual abilities. It comes of this very unique ability, really unprecedented in the history of the world, to connect unlimited numbers of strangers, individuals who don't know each other personally into a network that can accomplish things, you know, from flying to the moon to deciphering the secrets of DNA, building, waging wars, but also building hospitals. It's all done by these social networks of individuals, which in turn are based on information. And it's amazing to see through history how even seemingly small technological changes in information have very far reaching social and political and economic consequences. If you think, for instance, about one of the first revolutions in information technology in history, the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, what is today Iraq, about 5000 years ago, in technical terms, it was so simple. It was based on taking clay tablets-- and clay is basically mud. So, taking pieces of mud and taking a stick and imprinting signs in the pieces of, in the mud to preserve information. And these were the first written documents. And they created an immense change in human ability to organize themselves. And to take just one example, if you think about something like ownership, what does it mean to own something? To own a house. To own a field. So, if you live in a pre-literate society, a society without documents in the ancient Middle East or in ancient Canada, to own a field means that your neighbours agree that you own it. It's a community affair. They agree, yes. This field is yours so they don't graze their goats or sheep there. And they don't go to pick fruits there without your permission. But since ownership is a community affair, it also limits your private property rights. For instance, you can't sell your field to a stranger to somebody else without the agreement of the neighbours, because ownership means the agreement of the neighbours. It also limits the ability of some distant king or dictator to create a huge centralized kingdom. Because to create such a kingdom you need soldiers, to pay the soldiers unique taxes, and to levy taxes, you need information on who owns what. And nobody in-- the king can't remember who owns all the fields in all the villages in the region. So, before writing, you don't see any large kingdoms of empires anywhere in the world. And then you have these pieces of mud. And the mud changed everything. Suddenly, to own a field means none of the neighbours agree that this field is yours, that there is a piece of dry mud which says that this is yours. And it sounds funny, but it's the same today. If you-- I'm not sure about the legal system in Canada, but in most places, to own a house or a field means that there is a piece of paper. Okay, so we advanced from mud to paper. And in some places it's even digital, but it's basically the same thing. To own something means that there is a document that says this is yours, which on the one hand increases individual property rights because now you can sell your field to someone, a complete stranger, without the agreement of your neighbours. Because, to transfer ownership to that stranger you just need to transfer that piece of mud or that piece of paper. Even if the neighbours don't agree that this field belongs to that person, you can use the court and the police to enforce the claim. You also suddenly have the ability for a distant king to create these centralized authoritarian systems because the king creates and archive with lots and lots of these clay tablets or papers or whatever. And now, the king knows who owns what over thousands of kilometres and creates a taxation system and pays soldiers and creates a kingdom. So, even such a small change in information technology completely revolutionises the way that you can construct human networks. And also, it's very telling that it never has just one possible outcome. It often has contradictory outcomes. The same technology, for instance, strengthening both individual rights and the potential for authoritarian control at the same time.

MG: What is it that scares the hell out of you when it comes to this latest bit of information technology, artificial intelligence? Because we have seen a series of escalations when it comes to how technology can be used. And-- but there is something, the way that you talk about it in this book, there is something that is different about AI.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Absolutely. Everything you see, you know, from the invention of writing, and then you have the book and then you have the printing press and then you have radio. And each of these information revolutions have its own consequences. But in essence, it was more of the same. AI is totally different because it's the first technology that can make decisions by itself and that can create new ideas by itself. A clay tablet could be used to impose taxes, but the clay tablet could not decide how much tax to take and who to tax. It was always a human being. The clay tablets were essential, but all the decisions were made by human beings. And the clay tablet could not invent a new tax. The same with the printing press, the same with radio. Radio cannot decide what to play. It's human making the decisions. And radio cannot write a new symphony or a new political speech. Only humans can. AI changes that. It's really, it's the first technology which is not a tool. It's an agent. And clay tablets, radio sets, they are tools in our hands. We use them. AI is, in a way, like us. It is an active agent doing things in the world which we often didn't anticipate and might lose control over. Which is why I think, you know, I don't think about AI as artificial intelligence.

MG: You call it alien intelligence.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I think the better acronym is alien intelligence.

MG: What does that mean?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Alien, not coming from outer space, of course. It's created here on Earth by us. But artificial implies that this is an artefact we created. We control it. And with each passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial and more alien in the sense that it makes decisions and invents ideas which are really different.

MG: Is it really that yet, though?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yeah.

MG: I mean, it's not writing symphonies yet, is it? It's perhaps printing things... It's writing bad symphonies.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: But this is the- this is-- I can't write even the bad symphonies. You know, it's a huge thing. I mean, we keep moving that the signposts that, you know, a radio couldn't write a symphony. Now we have something that writes bad symphonies and we are barely like ten years into the AI revolution. We haven't seen anything yet. And I don't understand music very well, but I understand texts. And when I look at the texts being produced by the very, very primitive AI of today, ChatGPT is still very primitive, it's just the first baby steps. I'm amazed that this is not some glorified autocomplete. It has an understanding of the semantic field of different words. It knows how to string, not just sentences, but paragraphs and entire stories. Again, you can say the stories are not good or the essays are full of hallucinations and lies. And this is true. And this is also true of humans in many cases. But the mere fact that the AI can create a long text which makes sense. Again, you can like it, you can not like it, but it's a real story or it's a real essay making coherent arguments or coherent narrative. And again, the key thing to understand is we haven't seen anything yet. This is just the very beginning.

MG: I spoke with Yoshua Bengio, who is known as one of the godfathers of AI just in the last couple of weeks. The timeline that he talks about when it comes to AI taking control, being smarter than us, and the fact that there's not kind of a, you know, hidden switch or a plug that we can kind of yank to take the thing out of power. He talks about it in years, not in decades, but in years. Is that-- you nod. Is that kind of the scenario? Because the outlook that you portray in this book is, it's a pretty grim world ahead.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Before we get into this, is it bad or good, the doomsday scenario, the wonderful promises, first of all, lets understand what is happening. You know, when I wrote Homo Deus and I started becoming interested in AI, it was 2015, 2016. So, people like Nick Bostrom, they talked about this development of superintelligence which will get out of our control and might basically take over the world and take over history. But this was seen as a kind of philosophical idea that might be relevant, you know, in centuries, in generations. And you look at the pace that this thing accelerated over the last ten years and now a lot of very serious people like Yoshua Bengio, like many others, they are really talking in terms of a few years. By the end of the decade, maybe. Within ten years. And I'm not in a position--I'm- my training is a medieval military historian. This is what I bring to the table. I'm not really a computer scientist. My expertise is to try to understand if these people are right, what are the consequences for religion? What are the consequences for warfare? What are the consequences for politics? But I, certainly, a few years ago, almost nobody was talking in those terms. And at present, there is no consensus, but a lot of extremely serious people, some of the brightest minds, the godfathers of AI, they are talking in those terms just a few years.

MG: What are you most worried about when it comes to AI?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Because it's an agent and not a tool, what worries me most is the kind of unknown unknowns. The things that by definition we cannot anticipate how it will-- if you can anticipate it, it's not really an AI. Again, there is now, because everybody's now caught onto this, oh AI is very important, there is a hype around it. Because of that it's becoming difficult to know what AI really is because everything is AI. Whenever they try to sell you something, they tell you, oh, it's an AI. These are AI shoes and these are AI socks. And like, if they have to sell you a coffee machine, oh it's an AI coffee machine. So, let me have two minutes just to explain very briefly, how do you know if something is an AI? Somebody tries to sell you a coffee machine and tells you this is an AI coffee machine. S, if the coffee machine cannot teach itself anything new, it just does whatever it was pre-programmed to do, like it was pre-programmed to make you an espresso cup, you press the button and espresso comes out, it's not an AI. It's an automatic machine. However, if when you approach the machine, before you even press a single button, the machine tells you, I've been watching you and millions of other people, and based on everything I've learned about you and other members of your species, I predict that you would like an espresso, and I took the liberty to already prepare you a cup.

MG: Sounds pretty good.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: That's an AI. And it's really an AI if it then tells you, actually, I've invented a new drink, which I call 'bespresso,' which is, I think you would like it even better than espresso. Here, try it out. So, this is an AI. It changes. It learns by itself. Yes, it was originally created by human beings like Yoshua Bengio. But it's, you can think about it like some kind of digital baby that you create something which its main ability is to learn and develop by itself in directions that you can't anticipate and control. So, when we think about the dangers of this thing, the dangers we can anticipate are, in a way, the lesser evil. Like, it's easy to imagine a scenario when a government, let's say a some paranoid dictator somewhere gives an AI system control over nuclear weapons. And then the AI does something that maybe even the dictator didn't expect which results in a nuclear war. Similarly, we can anticipate that a group of terrorists would use AI to create a new super virus and create a new super pandemic. It's more difficult to anticipate scenarios like AI causing a financial crisis much bigger than 2007, 2008. But in many ways this is more likely. Finance is the ideal playground for AI, because it's a purely informational field. It's just data. You know, when you ask yourself, why don't we have self-driving cars all over the place despite all the hype and promises? Because cars are messy. They need to deal with traffic, with the physical world, with potholes, with pedestrians, with cats, with dogs. It's difficult. Finance, it's just information. What happens if we give more and more control of the financial system to AIs, which invent, not just new financial strategies but new financial devices? The history of finance, again, it's art, basically. It's humans inventing, creating very imaginative things like money in ancient Mesopotamia. And then at a certain point, they invent cheques and credit and all kinds of ETFs and CDOs and whatever. And the big financial crisis of 2007/2008, it started when a few financial wizards in Wall Street invented this new financial device, CDOs, collateralised debt obligations, I think it's called, which was so complicated that almost nobody understood it, certainly not the regulators. For a few years, everything looked wonderful. They made billions and billions of dollars, and then everything collapsed. And with hindsight, people realized, oh, we didn't regulate it properly, partly because almost nobody understood what it was. What happens now if we give AIs the power, or they take the power, to start creating new financial devices which for a few years create immense wealth. The markets were never better, as in this new, wonderful AI era. And after, say, five years, there is a huge financial crash, much, much worse than 2008. And not a single human being on earth has any idea what is happening, because the AIs created financial devices which are orders of magnitude more complicated than what the human brain can comprehend. It's really beyond our capacity. But that's something which is, you don't often see in Hollywood science fiction movies about AI. And then there are all the things that we just can't anticipate because our brains are organic. Our imagination is limited by organic biochemistry, and AI is not organic. It thinks in a fundamentally different way than any organic entity. And what's out there that we can't anticipate? This, in some ways is the most frightening thing.

MG: I mean, the question that is at the centre of this book, which is at the centre of much of what you've written, is how is it that human beings can be so smart and yet so stupid at the same time? Have you figured out the answer to that? What is wrong with us?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes.

MG: You have?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yeah. It's-- the problem is not with us. It's with our information. I mean, in many theologies and mythologies, when this question is raised, 'If humans are so wise, why are we doing so many stupid and self-destructive things?' then the basic theological or mythological answer is, there is something faulty. There is a deep flaw in human nature which makes us self-destructive. And like, we are evil in some way. And I don't think that's true. I think the vast majority of humans, of people, are good. They are compassionate. Yes, they have a dark side, but they also have very good sides. The problem is not in our nature, it's in our information. And we became very powerful, not as individuals, but as these large networks of cooperation. And unfortunately, it's much easier to make people cooperate using fiction and fantasy and delusion than by using facts and truth. And to take an example, if you want to build an atom bomb. So ,you need to know some facts about nuclear physics. Otherwise the bomb will not explode. But you also need to get millions of people to cooperate on this project to mine uranium, to build reactors, to feed all of these millions of people. The Manhattan Project directly employed hundreds of thousands and indirectly, millions more. Now, how do you get all these people to cooperate if you just tell them the facts of physics? E = mc². So what? This doesn't motivate. This doesn't inspire. And unfortunately, history shows us that the easiest way to inspire people is with fantasies and mythologies. So, in the end, the atom bombs, the decisions about how to use them are not in the hands of experts in nuclear physics. They are in the hands of experts in various mythologies.

MG: That's the first part of my conversation with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, recorded live on stage in Toronto last week. In part two, we dig deeper into the politics of information networks and speak about how algorithms have helped fuel ethnic violence in Myanmar, the role of internet filter bubbles in the Middle East conflict, and why you might want to go on an information diet. This is something Harari does every single day, and he will explain why in part two of our conversation. You'll hear that tomorrow on The Current. Well, coming up after your regional update: Annette Venebrügg and Tina Oehmsen-Clark have been friends for more than 40 years. In March of 2020, they started sending each other one word every day. Not a sentence. Not a story. Just a word back and forth from Hamburg to Toronto. And they haven't stopped.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: Of course, it's in a way, a long-distance relationship. They are tricky. I might not see this person ever again, but it's my best friend. So, it's a great addition to have a project like that because it ties you together. I love that.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Documentary producer Alisa Siegel brings us this story of a long-distance friendship powered by one word, two languages. That's coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. Stick around.

[Music: Fades up]

How one word a day sustains this friendship

Guests: Tina Oehmsen-Clark, Annette Venebrügge

MG: Hello again, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. It began with a single word, and a single word it remains. Each day, Annette Venebrügge in Hamburg, Germany, types one word and sends it to Tina Oehmsen-Clark in Toronto. And each day, Tina records and dispatches a single word to Annette. Tina and Annette met as art students at the University of Hamburg more than 40 years ago, and soon after they graduated, Tina moved to Toronto. Their friendship was tested by time and distance. And then in the early days of the COVID pandemic, they dreamed up a project. Here is Alisa Siegel's documentary, One Word.

SOUNDCLIP

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: My name is Tina Oehmsen-Clark. I'm an artist. I'm originally from Germany. I've lived in Toronto since 1995, and I work as an art educator.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: My name is Annette Venebrügge. I am an artist and living in Hamburg, Germany.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: One of the conversations we had on the phone, I said we should do a project because we want to talk every day.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: Tina and I were once talking about how strange some words sound when you hear them by their own without their context. And so, we decided to collect such strange words. And the idea was to send a word to the other person every day.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: One word. Every day. Just a word. Not a sentence, not a story. Just a word. Leave it open. We started with a lot of words from our childhood. From our upbringing, school, clothing, food even, and all the essential things that you remember when you were young. It was especially exciting also for me because of the connection with the German language, which I missed.

[German speech]

ALISA SIEGEL: You don't wish that you could convey more in a sentence?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: No, I would absolutely not say that I would go to a more, you know, like a sentence or a story or something like that. No, absolutely not. I love that it's just a word.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: The single word is more open for interpretation. You have to turn to the mind of the other person, and if you explain something with two words or with the sentence, this is gone.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: When we started, it was an experiment. We didn't know how long we would do it. It could have lasted for two days or two weeks, but it kept going. The project has been going on since March 2020, so over four years already.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: We have 3262 words so far. Today.

[German speech]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I remember that time after our final examinations that we sat on the docks of the harbour in Hamburg. Do you remember that?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Of course. The [german speech.]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: Yeah. [German speech.] And we have been talking and watching. And the feeling was this feeling of being between something. We finished the examinations and there was just a future coming unknown. And I remember a word about this relation between sea and land and everything on the sea. [German speech.] People who are working on the harbour.

[German speech]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: And this last word means the going away. I remember that I have been crying, crying, crying. I was unable to have a last look to her. I don't know why.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Getting goose bumps. I moved to Toronto and our friendship obviously was challenged because we were so far away from each other.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: Our friendship has been drifting apart secretly when she left. And the project is, it is able to overcome the physical distance and the time gap to our last meeting.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: It turned out with the time difference between our countries, which is six hours, that I send my words normally around maybe 6:00, kind of dinner time. And so, Annette would get that word in the morning.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: Just when I lay in bed, the first thing every morning is to read the word Tina sent to me.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: And she sends her word. So, I get my word in the morning, too. So, when I put on my device in the morning, the first thing I get is the ping. And I know, ah, there's my word/

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: For me, it's like I'm not alone.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Even though we are in different time zones, we are across the Atlantic from each other. We haven't seen each other in years. And then we have that connection to each other. A daily connection and also a daily word.

[German speech]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: For me, it's like a ping-pong. I receive a word from Tina and I answer. I respond to Tina, maybe Tina thinks that she responds to me because it's a ping-pong. Tina says ping. I say pong.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: So, I write them down, both mine and hers. So I could plaster an entire wall with these handwritten words and they'd become a physical object. And I use voice memo on my phone, and I record it and the words document also has become kind of like its own thing because you can translate it now and you can make sound pieces out of it.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Once I had it in the work program, I looked, if there's something like text to speech or something like that and I let it play and I almost fell over because the words obviously are in the German languages and the reader voice reads it with a English accent or English pronunciations.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: And then I realized also I could change the speed.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: I can have it being read by robotic voices, by somebody with a French-Canadian accent, with a French accent, you name it.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: And so, your words that you know so well and that are so ingrained into your past all of a sudden sound completely different and they become this mishmash of sound and accents.

[German speech]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I think that Tina is able to understand a hidden sense in the world I send to her. When I see that Tina shares this idea of the sense of a word with me that makes me glad.

ALISA SIEGEL: What has surprised you most of all about the project, Tina?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: The obvious surprise is that it works and that it's ongoing and that it has a future and a past and the present, which is also great because we can look in the past from four years ago or three years ago or two years ago. We can look at today, we can, you know, think about the future. It surprised me how quickly we get used in our lives to a routine.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: When I wake up, it's a ritual like brushing your teeth.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: I have it ingrained in my body memory by now, around 5:00, Oh my God, I've got to send a word.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes the word comes to me.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: And sometimes words come to me in my dreams, actually. I wake up in the morning and the word is already there. In a way, it is a constant conversation. And so, she, in a way, is always with me. Is always in the back of my head. Because if I pick up a word somehow, if I'm reading a book or if I'm watching a German movie or TV show and I hear a word, right away, it's there.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: The word [german speech] this is the watch constructed in the Black Forest where a small bird comes out every hour and says, [german speech.] This is a [german speech.] And when I read the word, the sound comes back to me and I love it, to say [german speech]. It's like the sound the bird makes. [german speech.] And the same to the following word [german speech.] [German speech] means sparkling water. And in the [german speech.]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: There are lots of funny moments. There are words that are just killing me. Gurkentruppe. Gurkentruppe is a group of people that are completely off. And if you translate it directly, it's a cucumber troop. It's a very strange word. There's schnarchlappen. So, you say that to somebody who's really slow and boring. And when you translate it directly, it would mean a snoring rag. It's a terrible word.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: The joy is to keep the friendship with Tina. To play. Tina keeps my, one of my best friends because of having this permanent contact. And the one-word ping-pong is different to writing letters or having a cell phone speech because then you're talking about concrete things. And in this ping-pong, you have to turn to the other person in a much more intensive way. This kind of dialogue has much more intimacy, I think, because you have to slip into the other's spirit, into the other's mind, much more than if you are talking about things in a common way.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Sometimes I look at the word that she had sent before and then something comes to me. So, it's intuitive to answer to the word. It's a process of reacting to the words to also see what maybe the emotion on the other end is. Is somebody not feeling well or is there a fire right now? Or, my God, did you get flooded? Do you-- where's this word coming from? And then you realized, oh, this word. Is this happening to my friend? Is she in trouble? Is there something going on that I should know?

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: What might she have wanted to tell me? What might have been her attraction of a word?

ALISA SIEGEL: Are you trying to tell her something about what's occurring in your life? Or are you trying to entertain her? Are you trying to spark something in her?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: I think it's more about telling her something about myself. This is me. These are my words. But at the same time, I'm learning something about myself because I look at my words and go, where do these come from?

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I used the word [german speech] and this is what I want to construct. That there is the space where you comes in contact with secret meanings of another person.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: And that's the beauty of the project too, is because it's about imagination, association, interpretation, that these one words, they are floating to me and floating back to her.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: For me, the magic of the project is that I am able to discover unexpected meanings of words, which opens me a space which is new. And I, by myself would be unable to discover that. This is the magic. And when Tina finds a word which I have forgotten for years, I love those moments. When a forgotten word comes back to me, I remember an emotional moment. It was about the word affenschaukel. Can you translate it, Tina?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Sure. It's a monkey swing.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: A monkey swing, and this is a kind of hair styling.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: In the affenschaukel, you have these long braids, and then you tie them up into a swing on each side of your head, which is why it's called the monkey swing.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: And it put me directly back to my childhood, and this special hair styling. And to be a child, and I recognize that Tina is really a witness of those feelings to be a child in the 60s. And this was a moment which was warm. And for me, it says everything about the emotional quality of this connection.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: At some point I sent her pissnelke, which means, well, to piss, you know. And pissnelke is a carnation. So, a carnation that pisses which is a swear word for somebody who annoys you. But also, you know, there are those joke flowers with the little water squeezer that you have in your jacket pocket and then, oh, smell my flower and then the water squirts out. So, that could also be a pissnelke. But it's a quite a harsh swear word. And she reacted immediately and said, What the hell? You know, so... So, it can be a surprise. And of course, I didn't mean her. Pissnelke.

ALISA SIEGEL: Do you ever use the words as a way to convey some of your own internal struggles?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: So, there are days when I do send words that express my moods. Sometimes, even just one word can express a little bit of anxiety or unhappiness, perhaps. But we have not really addressed it. But let it pass.

ALISA SIEGEL: Do you mean that sometimes you're not sure how your word will land with Annette?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Yes, sometimes it can happen that I think twice if I should send a word or maybe three times and look for an alternative because I might have an intuition that says maybe she sees it the wrong way or it might offend her. Or also, maybe it's boring. It's meaningless. Because I think we both try to put meaning in our words.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: It is something like a timeline. It's a very personal timeline. It's a very personal recording of time, of what happened in Annette and my world.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: This timeline, it's growing with us.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Of course, the age plays a big role in the project because Annette and I have known each other for more than 40 years and we are both getting older.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I'm 66 now and of course I know the limits of life. We are in this more or less in the same age. Tina is one year younger than I am, and so we share similar experiences. And so, those experiences can be the core of a sequence.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: I have learned to trust Annette. I'm very happy having a friend that I learned that I can count on her and that she's there and I'm there for her. We share a past that we share this project and that we share in a way also whatever comes in the future, because we don't know.

[German speech]

ALISA SIEGEL: What would you say is the most intimate thing you've revealed to Annette through the single words?

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: What is the most intimate revelation? That's a good question. I mean, what do I reveal about myself? Perhaps that my emotional state is not always stable. Yeah. I think that's it.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: It is like a diary, but not as explicit like a diary is. I write a diary by my own, but the things I wrote there are not as open as the things I rediscovered when I read the words.

[German speech]

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: Of course, it's in a way, a long-distance relationship. They are tricky and I might not see this person ever again, but it's my best friend. So, it's a great addition to have a project like that because it ties you together. I love that.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I hope that in the future we will have conversations that pick up signs from today so that I can, when I'm 80 years old, and Tina sends me a word, which remembers me to today.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: This simple idea became this almost untouchable sculpture that hangs above us and that we are doing and it is now there, it exists. We created something that gives me a lot of joy and also of interesting thoughts. There's always some sort of hope. I think this is a very hopeful project in a way. I like that about it.

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: I think that the project will continue as long as we live, and there is no reason to end the project before one of us dies.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: It will last forever.

[German speech]

ANNETTE VENEBRÜGGE: She is a [german speech.] She is a witness of my existence, of the fact that I am still alive. And I hope that will last and she will be the witness of all the following days of my life and the same to her. I really hope to have this lifelong witness really, forever.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: It's almost like a marriage. We promised each other.

ALISA SIEGEL: It's a commitment.

TINA OEHMSEN-CLARK: It's a commitment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I have not thought about that before.

[German speech]

MG: That documentary, One Word was produced by Alisa Siegel. That is The Current for this Tuesday. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. In the spirit of German to English translation, we're going to leave you with a famous dual language hit. When I was growing up, you would hear this song on the radio, either in English and then sometimes you would hear it in German as well. It was very strange. NENA, 99 Luftballons, or 99 Red Balloons. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: '99 Luftballons' by NENA]

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Tuesday September 17, 2024 Full Transcript

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