The Ledger, every show

“And once you have an external entity, An algorithm that knows me better than I know myself. This is the real turning point. This is the point when individualism as we've known, it doesn't make any sense when democracy in the free market become completely obsol…”

“And even when people testify in court, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they swear on the Bible, which is so full of fictions and myth and error. It's like you can swear on Harry Potter just the same.”

“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”

“So it's now foreign relations increasingly is relations with the Trump family. Not with United States, which is why so many countries are doing business with certain members of the Trump family in order to influence US foreign policy. So this is really going b…”

“The truth is that during the war, the recent war between Israel and Hamas, Hamas committed atrocities and also Israel committed atrocities. This is the truth. It's not that, oh, there is the Palestinian truth that only the Israelis committed atrocities, and th…”

“That can read and remember all the books, and has a chance of becoming the new authority. That people will increasingly, they have a question, they will not go to a human rabbi, they will go to an AI, and it's the same in Christianity, and it's the same with I…”

“In which the AIs decide, we'll buy that, we'll sell that, we'll invest here, we'll buy, and the AIs interact with the other AIs, and if they are more intelligent than us, they will make better business decisions, they will gain more money and they will take ov…”

“I would say this is, this has been the biggest political achievement of humankind, and this is now being deliberately destroyed by some of the most powerful people in the world.”

“What we saw with Dodge and similar efforts is not getting rid of bureaucracies, is getting rid of human bureaucrats and replacing them with AI bureaucrats, which are far more opaque, far more secretive. You can't understand what they are doing. They are far le…”

“So after four billion years of evolution, of organic life forms, we are really on the verge of creating the first inorganic life forms, and if this happens, It's the greatest revolution in the history of life since the very beginning of life.”

“Science now tells us that when you look inside, you don't find any single authentic self. You find a cacophony of different conflicting voices that Well, none of which is your true self. There is just no such thing.”

“If in the 20th century, the big fear for individualism was that the individual will be crushed from outside, now the threat comes from the opposite direction. The individual will break up from inside, and then the entire structure of individualism and democrac…”

“The present stage of neo-nationalism or tribalism, I think it's just a phase. It's a backlash against globalization, and the main problem, it doesn't have any solutions to the deep problems of the 21st century. All the major problems of humankind in the 21st c…”

“Now we are entering a post-humanist era. Authority is shifting away from humans. If in the last 300 years we saw authority descending from the clouds, To earth, to humans, now authority is shifting back to the clouds, but not to God, but to the Google cloud, t…”

“However, in the 21st century it might be possible for the first time to translate economic inequality into real biological inequality. And once this starts, it becomes almost impossible to close the gap.”

“Religion is a virtual reality game that provides people with meaning by imposing imaginary rules on an objective reality.”

“Most people today have absolutely no military value.”

“But if you don't need them as soldiers or workers, then the incentive to build hospitals and schools and so forth diminishes.”

“You know, the irony, to some extent, is that the more attractive an idea is, chance, the bigger the chance that it's not true. It's so easy for people to find evidence supporting the story they want to believe. So the more you want to believe a story, the more…”

“Everybody wants to believe that there is something after death. You know, this is universal in almost all religions in different forms, and the evidence is so meager.”

“Even if you get what you want in the short term, and what happened in the last, of course, it's not just the last few weeks, it's the last few years, but the Europeans will not forget that. And the feeling that you get that, I don't know, your best friend is w…”

“And what is happening now in AI that if for the previous decade we saw this competition for human attention, That the algorithms are competing to grab our attention. Now the front is shifting from attention to intimacy. AIs are learning how to create intimacy …”

“Our biggest mistake is that over the last 10 years, we gave one of the most important jobs in the world to algorithms, and they did a terrible, terrible job.”

“And the AIs experimented on billions of human beings and discovered something, that if you want to increase engagement, to grab people's attention and make them stay longer on the platform, press the hate button. In the human mind, press the greed button or th…”

“You know, people say about AI that AI is glorified autocomplete, that AI just predicts the next word in the sentence. Observe your mind and you will see it's exactly the same thing. Like you have an AI inside you.”

“I don't think we have reached that point in 2026, but I think we are close to the point when the most important, powerful, if you want, entity on the planet is no longer a human being, Or a group of human beings, but an AI.”

“Capitalism, yes, of course, capitalism doesn't necessarily need people. It needs money and profits. A.I.s can do can do that. Capitalism already created non-human persons which run the show and they are corporations.”

“We could reach a point when, for instance, currency will be AI tokens, or even time on servers, or data. That AIs will trade with other AIs for tokens or for data, not for dollars. And the human currencies, like dollars and euros and yens, they will become irr…”

“If you're trying to, you know, you build your skills as a young person, don't focus on a very narrow skill like coding, because maybe in five years they don't need coders because AIs code better than us.”

“Like, for me, religion is, is in many ways the opposite of spirituality. That religion is about giving people answers that you are not allowed to question.”

“I think the main products of the 21st century will be bodies and brains and minds.”

“Thousands of years, human society have been built on shared fictions and shared illusions, and there is nothing new about that. It's just that with technology, actually our fictions and illusions become more powerful than ever before.”

“I think the big breakthrough will come with biometric data. So far, most of these algorithms, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or whatever, they work mainly on the basis of data external to my body. They follow me around in space, see where I go, which places I …”

“An AI teacher that studies you while it is teaching you and adapting to your particular strengths and to your particular weaknesses, also breaking down all the traditional limitations and barriers of modern education.”

“I think we are seeing, and we will see more and more the rise of kind of techno religions, religions based on technology that make all the old promises of traditional religions. They promise justice and happiness and even immortality and paradise.”

“It will have much better sources of data coming from within your body. So their ability to diagnose emotions will be better than the ability of most, if not all humans.”

“We are talking in terms of decades. And once the transition takes place, especially in the civilian economy, in the military, it already happened. We are there. In the civilian economy, maybe we have 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, nobody really knows.”

“Technology is never deterministic. You can build very different kinds of political and social systems with the same kind of technology.”

“You cannot be elected US president if you say that you are an atheist.”

“This is, I think, the most, again, this is goes back to this kind of cynical worldview. Everything is a power struggle. Nobody cares about truth. Everybody, whatever they say, is just some kind of manipulation. This is giving an open check. For the real liars.”

“The truth is that Palestinians have a right to live in security and prosperity and dignity in their country of their birth, and Israelis also have a right to live in security and prosperity and dignity in the country of their birth, and the truth is also that …”

“Like you had these models from Taiwan, that they actually built it and it worked well, that you can take the same basic premises of social media and reverse them. You can have the algorithm rewarding content, like the algorithm, first of all, in this Taiwan sy…”

“A couple of months ago, they caught Putin and Xi in Beijing talking privately when they thought that nobody was listening and the microphones were on. And this was amazing, because what were Putin and Xi talking about in private? They didn't talk about Ukraine…”

“The highest echelon of society today is obsessed. With their mortality and living forever, because for the first time in history they feel that it's not just religion, maybe science has a cure for death.”

“For the first time in history, the average health care budget was around 10%. First time in history, on average, all over the world, governments spent more on healthcare than on the military.”

“And a disruption of the economy, say by the rise of AI, will require a global solution. And most people who think about universal basic income, they think in national terms. Universal for them means US citizens.”

“We have a third kind of asset, which is knowledge. And the more knowledge you have, the more energy and raw materials you also have because you discover new sources of energy and new sources of raw materials.”

“I think the main point of Sapiens, which is as relevant today as ever, is that, ah, history is shaped by the human imagination, by fiction, and not just by truth, that humans control the world because we know how to cooperate better than any other animal on th…”