## Humankind’s Comparative Advantage ## Source details **Canonical URL:** [Humankind’s Comparative Advantage](https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/12/cafe-economics-humankinds-comparative-advantage-yuval-noah-harari) ## Other formats - [Markdown version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/12/cafe-economics-humankinds-comparative-advantage-yuval-noah-harari/index.md) - [Structured JSON version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/12/cafe-economics-humankinds-comparative-advantage-yuval-noah-harari/index.json) - [Bundle manifest](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/12/cafe-economics-humankinds-comparative-advantage-yuval-noah-harari/bundle-manifest.json) ## Bibliographic details - Authors: BRUCE EDWARDS - Published: December 3, 2024 --- ### Storytelling, trust, and human cooperation - 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. ### Money and the information economy - 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. ### AI as a new, transformative, and potentially alien technology - 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.” ### Truth, expertise, and democratic choice - 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. ### Potential economic and policy implications (recommendations and warnings) - 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. ### Notable publication and context details - 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.* --- ## Content in this bundle - **Humankind’s Comparative Advantage** - [Humankind’s Comparative Advantage (Markdown version)](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2024/12/cafe-economics-harari.pdf.md){rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"} - [Humankind’s Comparative Advantage (PDF)](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2024/12/cafe-economics-harari.pdf){rel="external" type="application/pdf"} --- _Source: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/12/cafe-economics-humankinds-comparative-advantage-yuval-noah-harari_