Cambridge Business Association
Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation
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Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation

Top Global Historical Trends Shaping Humankind Today

Kara Swisher, Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari
sponsor Landmark Bank, 2021
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8

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In a provocative and wide-ranging conversation with tech journalist Kara Swisher, historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and behavioral economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, consider history, human nature and technological change. They note significant broad trends and cast the future shift to AI decision-making as world-changing. 

Summary

Responsibility for decision-making is shifting to artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms.

Most decision-making is full of noise. People’s decisions are less biased than they are noisy. Humans are narrow, noisy thinkers, but robots and AI are not. They are better at analyzing algorithms, and their processing frames ideas broadly. One consequence is that AI will be wiser and ultimately more emotionally intelligent than people.

Exercising emotional intelligence calls for analyzing biological signals – voice, facial movements, and the content and tone of speech. Emotional intelligence depends on pattern recognition, at which AI excels, so biometric sensors may prove better able to analyze someone’s emotional state than other people could, and it doesn’t introduce emotion or noise. Still, while AI may develop emotional intelligence, it will not develop emotions.

Today human judgment remains central to business, so the need to improve how people make decisions remains an important near-term consideration. Instead of making stock-trading decisions, people will be able to set up algorithms to do that...

About the Speakers

Kara Swisher is a technology journalist and host of Pivot podcast for New York Magazine. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel prize–winning behavioral economist and psychologist and author of the bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow. Yuval Noah Harari is a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and best-selling author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

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