Humankind’s Comparative Advantage

Source details

Core finding: Human power derives from cooperation enabled by shared stories; these stories build trust that allows cooperation among “unlimited numbers” of people, unlike other species (example: chimpanzees can cooperate only in very small numbers).
Illustration: “You have 8 billion people in the world today who—despite many differences and many conflicts—are almost all part of the same trade networks.”
Examples of stories that build cooperation:
- Religions: enable millions to cooperate on charitable enterprises or wars through shared mythology.
- Money: “the most successful story ever told” that everyone believes, enabling economic exchange.

Assertion: Money is a cultural artifact and a fiction; currencies have no objective edible value but function because people believe the story.
Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and similar assets characterized as “stories” whose value depends on collective belief and trust.
Shift described in Nexus: movement “away from the money economy to one based on the exchange of information rather than currencies.”
Example: Google as a corporation that receives information rather than money; transactions increasingly take the form of information exchanged for information.
Consequence: “Power, wealth, the meaning of wealth shift from having a lot of dollars to having a lot of petabytes of information.” If goods and services can be bought with information, the centrality of money could diminish.

Key claim: AI is “the most powerful technology we’ve ever created” and “fundamentally different” from earlier inventions because it can “make decisions and create new ideas by itself.”
Present status: AI familiar in 2024 described as “just the very primitive first step in the AI revolution.”
Risks highlighted:
- AI can make complex decisions (including financial decisions) and invent financial devices humans may not understand or regulate.
- Concentration risk: “a very small number of countries are leading the AI revolution. Most countries are very far behind,” which could replay and amplify the inequalities of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution “on steroids.”
- Social destabilization: major changes in communication technology destabilize trust; AI-generated stories can replace human storytellers, causing a social and political “earthquake.”
Terminology: Reframing AI as “alien intelligence”—alien not from outer space but “coming from our own laboratories” and “making decisions and inventing ideas in a fundamentally different way than human beings.”

Distinction made between truth and desire:
- Truth is costly to produce (research, evidence, time, effort, money) and is a “very small subset of information.”
- Desire is what people want; democracy’s purpose is to give equal weight to everyone’s desires.
Institutional roles proposed:
- Build institutions of experts to analyze evidence and establish facts (for example, climate science), while leaving normative decisions about priorities to democratic processes.
- Experts should not dictate desires; they should inform the democratic “playground” with facts.

Recommendations and policy implications directly conveyed:
- Recognize and address the asymmetry in AI development: avoid allowing a small group of countries and corporations to monopolize AI power that can enable exploitation and domination.
- Invest in institutions that produce reliable knowledge and truth so democratic decisions can be better informed.
- Develop mechanisms to control and align AI with human interests before releasing “billions of alien agents into the world.”
- Acknowledge that financial regulation must prepare for AI-invented financial devices that may be beyond human comprehension.
Warnings:
- Failure to act risks repeating the harms of the Industrial Revolution on a much larger scale: “Think of what the steam engine and the telegraph did to equality in the world, then multiply it by 10, by 100, by 1,000.”
- If stories sustaining societies are generated by nonhuman intelligence, existing frameworks of trust and regulation may be insufficient.

Interview subject: Yuval Noah Harari, lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and distinguished research fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
Works referenced:
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (published in 2014; available in nearly 40 languages).
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (discusses evolution of communication networks and AI’s implications).
Format note: This interview appears in F&D Magazine and has been edited for length and clarity; a related podcast is available.

Source: Humankind’s Comparative Advantage, F&D Magazine interview with Yuval Noah Harari, Bruce Edwards, December 2024.

Humankind’s Comparative Advantage
- Humankind’s Comparative Advantage (Markdown version)
- Humankind’s Comparative Advantage (PDF)